Heretic
by Punctuator
Summary: Eighteen months after the events in "Pod," Capa and Cassie take what should be a relaxing trip to the Capa family home in Michigan, only to find that ideas and reality can sometimes clash in deadly ways. Rated for violence, blood, and sexuality.
1. Chapter 1

**HERETIC**

Only six meters down. The light shimmered from above, glinted weakly off the hardware on their suits. Loinnir Whitby held tight to the anchor line of the _Fallen Angel_ and looked through gray-blue water and her face plate and another at the boy who'd reminded her of Robert Capa. A first rule: the ocean was for all practical purposes as cold as space, and just as uncaring, and those who dove the depths had to keep their hearts just as cold. She hadn't. And now she was about to suffer for it.

Twenty minutes into their last staging stop, she signaled their ascent. She saw Teddy McElhone's blue eyes widen in panic. She held up a warning hand, shook her head.

_You brought it on yourself, lad._

They were nearly out of tri-mix. He was breathing off her spare tank; he had no choice but to follow her. She told herself as they pulled themselves up, along the line, that it wouldn't be so bad. Not so bad, at least, as popping for the surface from sixty meters down. Nothing could be as bad as that. His first deep dive, the boy's, and Ari McElhone had lied, had bloody well lied, to her: his nephew was no more ready than McElhone was ready to take him down, and Whitby like an idiot had offered to partner with the boy--

Fouled his tank and his mix, McElhone's nineteen-year-old Teddy had, shouldering out of a wreck, a scuttled World War II merchant ship, all clumsy, panicked stumbling in the sudden blackout rise of silt. Tangled his line, bunged his tank, blown his air, and all the rules said she was to leave him, and he was to accept being left, to the cold and current, to the lost darkness at the bottom of the sea. But something in her wouldn't permit it. She managed to calm him; she managed to patch her spare tank to him. In the time it took to patch, she as much as doomed both of them, and she knew it.

Some twenty-seven minutes short. Better from nearer the surface than too far below. They were the last up. She could see the hull of the _Fallen Angel_ outlined darkly above their heads, a single angel's wing silhouetted against the glare of the sun.

They broke the blue-gray roil of the surface. Beside her, Teddy McElhone grunted in pain and panic. She released him. The suit floats would hold them. The sun filled her eyes, and then a heat like acid gnawed into her arms and legs and torso. DCS. _Fiery hell_. Decompression sickness.

The bends.

"Ah, fuck--" she groaned. The dive boat was less than ten meters off, and it might have been a hundred, for all the pain in her joints and muscles and lungs as she started to paddle. Richie was leaning off the side, her brother, the big galoot, his wild pepper-and-salt hair windmilling in the gusty air. He tapped his head, a dive gesture, while the remainder of the divers and the crew aboard the _Fallen Angel_ looked on; he shouted the words as well:

"Are yeh okay, Annalee--?"

He knew as well as she did even before Teddy, choking on a mouthful of salt water, yelled in reply: "No! Fuck, no--!"

"Prick, yeh-- Fuckin', fuckin' _prick_--" Whitby gasped, at the boy, at herself, while her pressure-sickened limbs swatted at the sunlight glittering on the gray waves and the pain flowed like lava through her gut and lungs and Richie dropped into the cold water with orange life rings and swam their way.

* * *

"You're a bloody stupid woman," Richard Whitby said.

The Olsen Marine Biology Centre had the finest decompression facilities on the west coast of Scotland, and that's where Whitby and Teddy McElhone had been flown, via Sea King, once Richie had fished them from the Atlantic. Four hyperbaric chambers, spacious and modernly outfitted, and since Whitby was the one who'd ultimately be footing the bill, Richie had secured two of the white spheres instead of one. He sat now on a folding chair within speaking-- or shouting-- distance of the comms panel on the chamber housing his younger sister.

"I know it, Richie." Whitby didn't bother looking at her brother through the thick glass of the chamber's observation window. She curled in on herself, her lanky body poorly housed in a heavy blue hospital gown, and pressed her aching head against the white poly-cotton coverlet on the chamber's thin mattress. "How's Teddy?"

"More alive than he deserves t' be."

It hurt too much to flinch. Whitby blinked slowly at the glass, just short of Richie's loving but justifiably critical eyes. Blinking hurt, too. "Is Mace here?" she asked.

"Comin' in. He'll be here in under an hour."

"Shoulda told him not t' bother."

"He's your fella, Annalee. Fellas like t' be on hand when their girls go an' try t' kill themselves. All part of the package."

"He's not--" She stopped. He _was_ her fella, Mace was, and she was his girl, and she had neither the right nor the spunk to argue it. Least of all from where she was, and least of all with Richie. "I wasn't trying to kill myself."

"'Cause as you know, and I know, there are cheaper, quicker, an' far more pleasant ways of doin' it, right?"

"Right."

Richie asked, more softly: "So why'd you do it, Annalee? Why'd you bring him up? Teddy was dead t' rights. Told me himself."

A wave of weariness joined itself to the burn remaining in her muscles. Her thoughts seemed to be a step behind; the words for the moment were as much a revelation to her as they had to be to Richie: "He reminds me of Robert."

"As in bloody stupid? Not an ounce of sense--?"

"No." Whitby frowned thoughtfully out through the glass, picturing in her mind the two of them, Teddy McElhone and Robert Capa, angelic, deceptively delicate-seeming, one, as she'd just learned, less tough than the other. "Just the youth of him. It's the eyes. Y'know: that clear-eyed thing."

"Cradle-snatcher," Richie muttered. He half-smiled.

Whitby smiled the other half, without offense.

"Where's Pete got off to?" she asked.

"Gave him some money for the machines." Richie glanced off behind himself, casting a look for the Pete who wasn't there, his nephew, his sister's son, just shy of twelve years old. "Boy went nearly two hours without eating, y'know. Was practically gnawin' the furniture."

She chuckled, and that hurt, and it brought her back to where she was. She went still against the mattress, the pressure of the chamber whispering like a tide in her ears. "Ah, hell, Richie, I'm sorry for puttin' you through it."

"Well, you're on break now."

"Sure."

"Doc says you might want t' lay off the deep stuff, at least until the baby's born."

"Sure," she echoed, more softly, a little sleepily. Then, abruptly, she was full-on focused and half off the mat, and she was staring at Richie and not noticing the pain or the pressure or the exhaustion banked well down in her body as she snapped: "What fucking baby?"

"The one wedged in yer guts, yeh stupid--" Richie's wild dark eyes went wide. "Y'mean you didn't _know_--?"

"Know what?"

Another voice, a man's, a manly man's, from beyond Richie's orbit. Whitby's heart, despite shock and better sense and the unspoken wishes of her sore, repressurizing chest, thrilled. On the portal's other side, Richie rose from his folding chair and made way for the most handsome man in Scotland. Tall, square-jawed, square-shouldered. Brown hair in a tidy buzz. Eyes, one real, one not, in sapphire blue. Scars along his right temple and cheek that made him that much more good-looking, at least to Whitby's way of thinking (and, she would like to know, and fiercely, too, who the hell else's way of thinking mattered where he was concerned?).

"Hello, there, Mace," Richie was saying. "Come t' see the sardine?"

Mace grinned, though the space about his eyes stayed serious. "Sure did." He rapped on the glass, looked in at Whitby. "What the hell were you trying to pull, woman?"

Whitby smiled for him a thin-lipped smile and hoisted painfully and affectionately the middle finger of her left hand.

Richie hoisted his eyebrows. "You two have things t' discuss. Obviously." He gave Mace and then Whitby a look shot through with pyrite sparks and added, ambling for the door, "Think I'll go an' assist Peter with molestin' the snack machines."

* * *

You didn't find many front porches on houses in Scotland. The Whitby house had one. Impracticalities, the intractable weather, be damned: Richard Whitby said the air and space helped with his writing. (His wife Mary said it helped him with sneaking the pipefuls of spicy tobacco he poorly kept secret.) The house, large and white, stood on a low rise a klick or two outside Mulvern, facing the western ocean. Stephen Mace stood on the porch looking out across the rocky beach between him and the darkening water at the setting sun.

He closed his flesh-and-blood eye, stared westward with his prosthetic. He had largely mastered its functions, the limitations and, better, the wonders of the device; now it showed him the sun much as he had seen it through the observation portal of the _Icarus II_: spectrographic churnings, color rather than blinding white glare, a corona of radiation invisible to normal human vision. It was beautiful.

But he was deeply, elementally glad to be home. Eighteen months had passed since they'd returned to Earth, he and Whitby and Capa and Trey, the four survivors of a desperate but successful mission to rescue the world from eternal winter. Eighteen months, and before that fifteen months post-mission in a lifepod. He and Whitby were here, stationed, at their discretion-- really, the four survivors of the second mission of Project Icarus were the greatest heroes in humanity's history, all modesty aside, and they could go where they pleased on the planet they had saved-- at the Royal Air Force base at Prestwick, while Capa and Trey prowled the halls of science and academia in the United States.

Capa, the sunmaker. Scrawny, scruffy, blue-eyed Brainiac, lording it over geekdom with Cassidy-- Cassie, the mission's original pilot before Whitby had replaced her, for a reason of tender indiscretion on the part of then-Dr. Capa and Cassie herself, which reason's name was now legally Charles Robert Capa, aged four-- at his side. Whitby and Mace had jump-flighted to San Diego for the wedding, eight months back. To their credit, they'd made it through the ceremony. They'd made it through less than all of the reception that followed. Mace grinned, remembering--

_Now **that** was a brawl_.

He re-opened his organic eye and looked bi-optically at their resuscitated local star. The sun cast a path of gold toward him, across the dark march of the western waves. The wind was rising, blowing up off the cooling water, and Mace shivered, though not with cold, not with fear or worry. A reminder, more: the world at large had changed, and now his own world, his life, was changing. Whitby was here, at home, in the house on whose porch he stood. She was still weak; she was still sore, and ornery for it; she was upstairs, asleep, in the room she and Mace shared when Richard Whitby's family was all under one roof.

_Family,_ Mace thought, the one word, at the setting sun.

"Are yeh marrying Mum?" Peter Whitby asked.

He wasn't trying to creep up, Mace knew: Pete was a quiet boy by nature. Pretty much the polar opposite of his crazy uncle and a weight of calm that balanced his mother's sometimes bristling intensity. In a way, he reminded Mace of Capa. A little older than his years, a little too thoughtful, maybe. But Mace liked the kid.

"Did Richie tell you to ask me that?"

"Nope." Pete watched him with his serious dark eyes. "Nor Mum neither."

Mace smiled. "You're looking out for her."

"Uncle Richie says it's my-- my--"

"Duty?"

"Aye."

"That's good, Pete. Duty's good."

The sun vacated the sky, leaving behind its path of light, dimming now to bronze, and a clear soft glow in the west. Overhead, the stars were coming out. Mace and Pete stood quietly together, watching the horizon go dark.

"Are yeh, then? Marrying her?"

"You think she'd go for it?"

"I do."

"How about you?"

Pete took his time thinking. "Be my dad then, wouldn't yeh?"

"Would you be okay with that?"

He saw, from the corner of his eye, the shy smile on Pete's face.

"Yeah."

"Peter Mace," Mace said thoughtfully. "Or Peter Whitby-Mace."

"Peter Mace. That'd be wicked."

Mace grinned, gently cuffed the back of Pete's head. "We'll see what she says, okay?"

"Okay."

The door behind them opened, and Richie stepped out onto the porch.

"Finish your homework, Pete?" he asked.

"Not yet, Uncle."

"Get to it, then." Richie held the door for him. Light and warmth spilled onto the wooden floorboards of the porch. "I need t' have a word with Mace."

"Okay." Pete looked to Mace, then went inside. Richie shut the door.

"Here?" Mace asked.

"Naw." Richie pulled himself up, shook his shaggy head. "I was thinkin' down t' the pub. An' it might be better if we walked. If yeh don't mind the exercise."

"If I don't mind staggering home half-bombed at two a.m., you mean."

Richie snorted at him and walked down the porch steps toward the road to Mulvern. Mace shook his head and followed.


	2. Chapter 2

Richie eased his rawboned tall self between steel-framed stools in the Gray Bear and gestured to Dar Urquhart, terry-toweling a glass on the far side of the bar. "Dar."

"Richie," said Dar, to the glass. He nodded a smile, flinty but cheerful, Mace's way. "Mace."

"Hi, Dar."

Said Richie, with a hint of conspiracy: "D' yeh still have that sixty-year-old Talisker, Dar?"

"No such animal, Richie." Dar traded the first glass for another, kept on with his polishing. "Told yeh time and again: Talisker never bottled anything older 'n twenty-five years."

"We'll take it, Dar. The sixty."

Dar set down glass and towel. He glanced up and down the bar. Eight other patrons were bellied up, five men, three women, all between twenty-something and sixty; not one of them was paying the least attention. Dar turned to the wall-mirror and the liquor shelves, reached well up and well behind, and drew a dusty deep-green bottle from the shadows just below the ornate workings of the black tin ceiling. A pluck and juggling, and he set two shot glasses on the bar, one before Richie, one before Mace.

"Hope yeh have the least clue how much this shite costs, Richard," he said, uncorking the bottle.

Richie nodded, reached with one big hand over the bar. "Let's have it, Dar."

Dar's dark brows locked in momentary confusion. He brought the bottle protectively to his midriff and stared out disbelievingly at Richie. "Yeh can't be serious."

"We'll take it. The bottle." Richie took out his wallet, counted out a thick stack of bills, laid the stack on the bar. He gestured at the Talisker. "C'mon, now. Give."

Dar set the bottle on the bar. He palm-smacked the cork back in place. He picked up the bills as Richie picked up the Talisker; he thumbed the stack and shook his head.

"_Fuck_, Richard." He whistled incredulously. He handed Richie half the bills, slipped the other half in the till, and went back to his polishing. Richie turned from the bar and headed into the shadows. The Bear was more cavern than tavern, and Richie was making his way back to the corner tables, to an area of admittedly variable headroom, where the light from candlejars bobbed on the scarred brick walls. Well away from the sound and fury of the television hanging opposite the bar proper, where the Duluth Taconites, visiting from the States, were having their collective arses handed to them on a muddy rugby pitch. Mace picked up the glasses and followed.

* * *

It wasn't a gentle whiskey. It hadn't the smooth syrup of Glenmorangie, the lightness of Dalwhinnie, the brisk elegance of Glenlivet. Frankly, it tasted like a bonfire in his mouth. Like the smoke of a bonfire, anyway. Peaty and acrid, well able to stand on its own two feet (and more than able to knock you clean off yours, given half a chance), and that's why Mace and Richie liked it. And this Talisker tasted unlike any other Mace had ever had. A polish to the peat, a depth that seemed to sink and buoy him at the same time. Mace sipped just enough to feel the buzz behind the smoke, then set his glass on the pocked dark wood of the table near the candlejar, where he could see the light playing through the gold and amber in the liquid.

"Pete," said Richie, slowly, following his own first sip, "is a fine boy."

"Sure is."

"Best son a man could want. If Mary and I had been able-- Ah, well, all turned out in the end." He took another sip, winced in appreciation or thought or both. "She's a fine woman as well."

"Mary? Sure."

"Don't be daft." Richie looked at him pointedly. His eyes glittered in the candlelight. "Yeh haven't had nearly enough."

Mace paused, looking at his glass. He drained it, and Richie filled it, and Mace said softly, before drinking again: "Yeah, she is."

Richie topped his own glass. "Make a fine wife. Aside from the fact that she can't cook, her housekeepin' skills'd make a badger blush, and she's got a fuck of a temper." His eyebrows rose as more Talisker descended his gullet. "Still, there's something t' be said for the troublesome ones."

It was starting to take hold. The whiskey, the mellow demon-peat. Mace smiled. "Yeah."

Richie chuckled. "Regular hellion, isn't she?"

"You bet."

"And a looker, t' boot."

"Beautiful." Mace grinned, nodded. "Doesn't even know it."

"Ain' it the truth." Richie poured, for himself, for the younger man opposite.

Mace took his glass. Then, whiskey mere smoke-sharp millimeters from his lips, he paused. "Hey. Should we be talking about her like this? She's your sister, Rich."

"_Pfft_." Richie shooed an imaginary moth from the light. "She's mad for yeh, Mace. Might be too daft t' say it out loud, but she is. Crazy-mad."

"I'm pretty crazy about her, too."

Richie downed his shot and asked, his face and voice absolutely sober: "So what's the holdup?"

Mace drank while he paused, but slowly, thoughtfully, taking whiskey from his lips with the very tip of his tongue. He watched the candle flame flick at the walls of the jar like a sun subatomically tiny held captive. He set the glass on the table in a shining ring of condensation and kept his eyes on the bottle neck as he poured himself another shot.

Richie asked gently: "Have yeh been with another woman since yeh've come back?"

"No."

"Have yeh _thought_ about another woman since yeh've come back?"

"Truthfully?"

Richie shook his head. "I'm not yet drunk enough t' take offense."

"Yeah, I have." It wasn't the whiskey that sent a wave of guilt through him, nor the fact that he was making the admission to the brother of the woman with whom he was currently and very much in love. He found himself thinking with relation to that woman a thought uncharacteristically humble and, moreover, found himself incapable of ascribing the humility to the liquor in his belly, the alcohol in his brain: _She deserves better_.

"But..." He saw his two women as the Talisker presented them, one coltish but delicate, dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful in a marble-sculpture way, the other long and lean and fair, with eyes as deeply blue as the North Sea and a fierce dare-you smile that could melt his heart. He smiled slightly, thinking of that smile. "But she's got a kid; she's married. Happily married. They're both friends, both her and-- the guy she's with. No fucking way would I mess that up."

Richie contemplated. The bottle, which was happy to yield from its dusty throat more liquid amber into the narrow waiting maw of his glass. The candle. Mace.

"So," said Richie, slowly and without malice, once the whiskey surrendered unto his glass had in turn accepted passage beyond his teeth and tonsils, "other than the odd nostalgic yearnin' for th' contentedly wed Captain Cassidy, you're free as a lark, am I correct?"

"Pretty much."

"Is it Danny Pinbacker's got yeh worried?"

It was like the feeling he had sometimes when he was working in a spacesuit, much, too, like one of the symptoms of depth narcosis Whitby had described for him: a paranoia, a sense that someone was standing behind you, just out of your peripherals, just out of sight. Daniel Pinbacker, captain of the _Icarus I,_ had been Whitby's lover-- her _fella_-- before Mace; Pinbacker was Peter's father. Whitby had told Mace as much, openly, as soon as it became obvious that their relationship had progressed from "intermittent" to "ongoing." And Daniel Pinbacker was not only her ex: he had died, depending on what report you read, depending on who you were and what you had witnessed, at least three times: first, as the captain of a ship lost sixty million miles from Earth; second, as a would-be saboteur, a madman set on preventing the crew of the _Icarus II_ from launching their sun-salvaging, Earth-saving payload; or three, in a manner most personal to Mace, as the last thing he'd seen before the explosion that took his eye and left him scarred: a figure in shadows and smoke. A phantom.

He was a pilot, Mace was. A pilot and a mechanic. He lived absolutely in the tangible world. Daniel Pinbacker was dead; as such, he was, literally, untouchable. For those who had known him, who had respected or feared or loved him, he lived on in memory. As a memory, he was, bluntly, something Mace could not fight. With regard to Loinnir Whitby, that frightened Mace more than it frustrated him. "Yeah. A little."

"He was a fine man, Dan was," Richie said frankly. "Can see it in Pete, can't you?"

"Yeah."

"Boy needs a father, Stephen. Not a bloody ghost. Not a daft uncle. Not an aunt-- even if Mary is the best woman in this world or th' next. He loves you, Mace."

Mace found himself smiling. "Kinda love him, too, Richie."

"_She_ loves you."

"Shit, Richie, you're wasting your time." His words were beginning to slosh, ever so slightly. Mace waited until they'd sloshed their way safely into Richie's ears. Then he waited, with the fixed, easy focus of early intoxication, until Richie had realized what he'd just heard and was preparing, finally drunk enough himself, to get offended over it. "I asked her this afternoon."

"The _fuck_ yeh did--!" Richie glared at him, incredulous. He hefted the two-thirds-gone bottle. "Y' mean I sat here an' watched yeh pour half this down yer bastard American throat for no good reason?"

Mace grinned. "Yep."

"On my pound, yet. You fucker, yeh." Richie poured himself a calming shot from the bottle in his hand. "She did say 'yes,' didn't she?"

"What else could she say?"

Richie considered. Then he snorted a chuckle. "Could think of several things, actually."

Mace felt his ears go warm. "Me, too."

* * *

When they got in, the light was on in the kitchen. Whitby was standing at the counter in a shapeless blue robe, pajamas, and slippers, eating a sandwich while she pored over dive reports.

"Have fun on your date, lads?" she asked, reaching for a mug of black coffee.

"Oh, aye. Even if the bastard wouldn't put out." Richie kissed her on the cheek. "G'night, Annalee." He took a bite from her sandwich and called back to Mace as he headed for the stairs to the second floor: "Night, Mace."

"Night, Richie. Thanks for the drink."

"Got it from both sides, didn't you?" Whitby said, once they were alone.

Mace took a swallow from her mug of coffee. "It was okay. He was really gentle with me."

She took back the mug and smacked his arm with her free hand. "I was talking about him an' Pete. They both hit you with it, didn't they?"

"Yeah." Mace smiled. "It was alright. I didn't mind. Got a hell of a bottle of whiskey out of it."

"Traded your heart for a bottle of booze, did yeh?" Whitby arched her eyebrows at him, went back to her sandwich and reports.

Mace wrapped his arms around her from behind. Whitby kept reading. They both got last bites off of the sandwich, finished the coffee. Neither of them spoke, but when Mace's hands left the horizon line, that is to say when they strayed both north and south, Whitby laced her fingers with his and gently brought his manual wanderings to a halt.

"You're drunk," she murmured.

"Not so drunk I can't fool around."

Whitby smiled slowly, the dare-you smile Mace had seen in his mind, in the Gray Bear, over the sweet peaty smoke of sixty-year-old Talisker.

"Prove it," she said.

Mace turned her to face him. Whitby looked at him fearlessly, evenly, lovingly. Mace ducked, caught her around the waist, put her easily over his shoulder, and carried her upstairs.

* * *

Capa had finished his packing; Cassie was that near to finishing hers. A five-day trip from their home in San Diego to the Upper Midwest, to Michigan, there to visit his parents and to attend the opening of a new science facility at Northern Michigan University, where John Capa served as a tenured professor of English literature, and then to the University of Minnesota, where Capa-- Capa the younger, Capa the physicist, the Capa who had saved the world-- was to present several guest lectures. It was to be something of a workaday break for the two of them, a mundane, quiet getaway while Cassie, five months pregnant with their second child (sex unknown: she and Capa settled, in a very old-fashioned and non-gender-stamping way, for declarations of "healthy" from Cassie's care professionals; that said, Cassie was as convinced that she was to give birth to a second son as Capa was certain that he'd soon be facing the mysteries of raising a daughter), still found travel enjoyable. Number-one son (or, if one were to side with Capa, _only son_, or _only-son-for-now_) Charlie's "California grandma"-- Cassie's mom-- and Jen and Dave, Charlie's beloved "sparents," a young couple who'd traded in their childbirth credits for accreditation in a government-sponsored nanny program, were to watch him while Capa and Cassie went north and east.

Cassie was in the bedroom; she was just about to shut down her touchpad and stow it in her carryon when the "Incoming" icon flashed in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. She accepted the message-- text, not audiovisual, and brief without being terse; she read; she smiled; she sent an equally brief reply, packed away her pad, and went out to the living area. Her husband and her boy were sprawled on the sun-splashed carpeted floor amongst big, colorful, little-hands-friendly pieces of a toy train set; presently, Robert Capa was demonstrating for his son the most effective way of causing a collision between the two engines on the tracks. It all had to do with the inability of coalesced matter to occupy space currently occupied by coalesced matter of equal or greater mass, or some such nonsense, and he and Charlie were, at any rate, taking great pleasure in the results.

"Hey," Cassie said.

Capa looked up, smiling. "You done? All packed?"

"Just about." She smiled back at him, at the lovely shock of his blue eyes, at the happy mess he and Charlie had made on the floor. "Had a message from Mace."

Capa stiffened slightly-- she had expected he would, old rivalries, real or imagined, never quite dying-- but he kept his expression gentle and easy as he boosted his lithe self up off the floor and came over to her. "Nothing serious, is it?"

"Not exactly. Sort of." Cassie reached over and straightened for Capa the waistband of the light-knit green sweater he wore. "He and Whitby are engaged."

He was the smartest man she knew, certainly one of the smartest men on Earth, and he could look so guilelessly blank that Cassie had to laugh. She laughed now, looking at him.

"Jesus, it's about time." Half-seriously, Capa added: "Do you think he'll be alright--?"

"If anyone could handle Loinnir, it would be Mace."

Capa looked uncertain and relieved, happy and concerned, all at once. Everything showed in his wide clear eyes. Cassie brushed soft brown hair playfully away from his left temple. He kept his hair short now, now that his life wasn't centered around a bomb the size of a very small moon, now that he wasn't living in a spaceship or the truncated lifepod remnants of that ship. He was whippet-slender and young, even younger-looking, and unorthodoxly handsome, his cheekbones high and precise, his lips full and lush without seeming decadent or cruel. Whether as a result of genetics, of his work, which dealt with the very fabric of reality, of something supernatural, something unearthly, or of any combination of those, he always seemed to Cassie not quite human. That didn't frighten or repulse her. Quite the contrary. When she called him "angel," she meant it.

"I hope you're right," he said, smiling again.

Behind them, Charlie laughed in delight as his engines jumped the tracks.


	3. Chapter 3

When they flew, he trusted her implicitly. If Cassie wasn't worried, Capa wasn't worried. On a regional jump-flight from San Diego to Sault Ste. Marie, they crossed the Rockies in a pocket of low pressure, just cresting a seventy-thousand-foot-high mountain of storm clouds, and next to her Capa saved his comments for the address he was to give for the opening of the new science facility at Northern Michigan U, shut off his data pad, rested his head against his seatback, and closed his eyes with a sigh. He took his clues from her. His face was peaceful, his expression utterly trusting. _Fine,_ Cassie thought, smiling affectionately, as thunder rumbled through the cabin. She shut her book-- a tattered paperback copy of _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_-- leaned up, switched off her reading lamp, rested her head near Capa's, and drifted off to sleep.

On the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, resurrected sun or no, winter still dictated her own schedule in the month of March. It was sleeting when their flight landed, and they ducked their heads against the cold wet pelting as Marjory Capa ushered them, post-hugs, after Capa had loaded their bags in the back, into what his mother had affectionately named the Behemoth, a big black hydrofuel SUV, not a rich man's toy but a working beast, a vehicle essential to her career as a field med-tech with the Michigan State Police, muddy and tending toward rust and sensibly low-slung on its nubbly tires, which said automotive monstrosity was at present parked illegally on the wet pavement just outside the sliding glass doors of SSM International's main terminal.

"Where the hell's Charlie, you two?" Marge asked of her son, seated and reaching for his seatbelt in the back, of her daughter-in-law, likewise belting herself in in the front.

"Told you, Mom: late August, early September. That's when we're bringing him." Capa leaned forward, against the draw of his shoulder-belt, to plant another kiss on his mother's cheek. "The baby'll be along then, too."

"Right." His mother shot a sharp, brown-eyed glance between the two of them, her son and his wife. "So what's it to be? Boy or girl?"

Cassie exchanged a sly look with Capa. "Yes," she said.

Marjory sighed. "Still want to play it the hard way, eh?" Behind the Behemoth, a cab sounded its horn, its driver obviously not buying into the idea that luggage-loading, teary greetings, and prolonged embraces constituted official police business. "Okay, okay--" she muttered, glaring in the rear-view screen, "-- we're _moving_."

* * *

"Thought this was all in the past," Capa said, looking out at the snowy forest, the fields of white spiked with brown tufts of grass, as they drove. Despite the fact that he'd grown up here, the snowiest region in the continental United States, where winter could last six months or-- in his young lifetime, when the sun had begun to fade-- even more, his tone suggested that for him, now, March meant the buds and tender green of spring.

Marjory Capa glanced at her son in the rear-view screen. "This is normal now, honey. You know that. Winter still comes; sometimes it lingers."

Capa settled back against the seat, smiled at the close-cropped hair, as dark as his but glinting with gray, on the back of his mother's head. "I know, Mom."

"Going soft, living in California, aren't you?"

"Yeah."

"Soft-staters," Marjory echoed gently, smiling. She glanced at Cassie, at the dark coat covering her belly. "How's it coming? Been sick much?"

"No," Cassie replied. "I'm lucky that way. Think it comes from being a pilot. I've never been prone to stomach trouble."

The slightest of frowns flickered on Marge's brow, a mother's uncritical concern. "Do they still have you flying now?"

Cassie shook her head, looking out through the wet ice splotching the windshield. "No. I'm on administrative leave for the duration. They have me training recruits."

"That's good."

"It is, actually." Cassie smiled. "I get first crack at all the latest sims. It's like being paid to take a continuing-ed course."

"Is Dad teaching today?" Capa asked, as Marjory steered their black rumbling monster onto Seventh Street, the main entrance route to the Northern Michigan campus.

"Believe he's lecturing in Jamrich," his mom replied, easing into a slushy left turn. Cassie watched out the side window. Snow on the ground, banked against red brick buildings. Multi-paned windows on stories above and below, reflecting squares of gray daylight. A dense population of tall trees, currently bare, catching triangular pockets of snow and sleet in the crooks of their black branches. Students in boots and heavy shoes, in a rainbow of parkas and jackets and caps, shouldered messenger bags and lumpy backpacks as they jostled down the wet sidewalks.

"They're expecting me to check in at Seaborg around two. That's right next door." Capa looked at his watch. "I've got time--" He leaned forward, between the front seats. "Want to stop and say hi to Dad, Cass?"

Cassie smiled. "Sure."

* * *

From his mother, Capa had inherited the color of his hair, the generous set of his mouth, his compact frame. Nearly everything else seemed to come from his father. Taller by possibly four inches than his boy, John Capa might have been his son's fair-haired older brother. As a family, they were, he liked to say, a combination that did not occur in nature: John came from a line of blonde, blue-eyed Hungarians; Marjory's family were brown-eyed southern Irish. The name Capa itself was an invention on the part of an overworked if dourly pragmatic Ellis Island clerk some two hundred years earlier, who'd seen fit to trim a thicket of Magyar consonants and syllables down to something more manageable. This led their early neighbors in the United States, mostly immigrants, like John's great-something grandparents, from Budapest, to wonder how a nominally Italian family that spoke perfect Hungarian had come to settle in their midst; John himself still spoke his ancestral language, and half a dozen other languages besides. He loved words. He spoke English with a clipped but gentle precision, an old-school clarity that was well suited to the lecture hall.

NMU was not a large school. Nestled (or huddling, depending on how one viewed the big lake's tempestuous temper) on the south shore of Lake Superior, it had nowhere near the student population of the mega-universities, the nation's large public colleges. When Cassie walked in ahead of Capa, through the half of a double oak door that he politely held open for her, John Capa was holding court over possibly three dozen students, scattered in half-desks on the hall's Formica tiers. Cassie gleaned, from Capa the elder's elegant voice and from the glowing touchboard spanning the breadth of the wall behind him, that Milton was the subject of the day. _Paradise Lost_.

Or found, given the expression on Professor Capa's face as he followed the looks of his students to the two trespassing in his lecture. He made no effort to hide his delight.

"Robert--! Cassie!" He greeted both of them openly with hugs; he lingered over Capa, holding his son close for a moment longer, maybe, than propriety before a university class might dictate. But Cassie, watching, seeing the hint of tears in John's eyes, the trace of wonder that tempered his happiness, understood exactly how he felt. Less than two years ago, they'd both believed Robert Capa lost, dead and gone. Having him back could still feel like a miracle.

"My son, Robert," said Professor Capa, finally releasing Capa and turning to face his class. "Those of you with a taste for scientific trivia might remember him: he lobbed a bomb into the sun a year or so ago." Chuckles from the tiers; Capa himself smiled, stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets, shuffled in amiable embarrassment. His father gestured toward Cassie. "And his wife, Lieutenant-- no, it's 'Captain' now, isn't ?-- Cassidy."

Cassie looked out at the class as Professor Capa did. "Captain," he said, "Robert. Welcome to Jacobean Literature two-oh-one." He flicked the sleeve of his jacket, a tweed in taupe and gray, away from a slim wristwatch with a black rectangular face. "We've just over forty minutes to go. _Paradise Lost,_ books nine and ten. Would you care to sit in?"

Capa looked slightly alarmed. "I, uh--"

"I'd love to," Cassie said, truthfully.

"Please, my dear: have a seat." To his son, John Capa said, "I imagine you have associates waiting for you in one of the science buildings, Professor Capa."

"You imagine correctly, Professor Capa," Capa replied.

"Then you may make good your escape, sir." More privately, John added: "You can meet us in my office when you've finished."

"Are you still in Gries Hall?"

"Mm hm. One-oh-eight."

"I'll see you there." Capa leaned in, kissed Cassie on the cheek. "Have fun."

Cassie squeezed his hand. "I will."

She made her way up into the tiers, exchanging smiles and hellos with John Capa's students as she went, while Capa's father saw him to the dark double doors. She was just seating herself, watching as Capa turned to leave, when a young woman called out: "Professor Capa?" A clarification, as both Capas turned: "Robert--?"

Cassie turned toward the source of the voice; most of the rest of the class did, too. One young man pointedly did not. He had light brown hair and very pale skin; he was long and thin in old jeans and a red sweatshirt that might once have shared a wash cycle with something that bled in blue, and he was writing in longhand in a spiralbound notebook. He was slouched in his desk at an angle that made it seem as though he were trying to push away from the words he was setting down.

The girl herself, the owner of the voice, was standing. She was very thin, very beautiful, also pale (as Cassie was reminding herself, given where and when they were, that was to say on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan just easing clear of winter, a profuseness of "pale" only made sense). Her hair shone a deep gold in the light of the overheads; she was nineteen, possibly twenty, years old.

Capa frowned up at her politely. "Yes?"

"Who may sit at God's right hand?"

"I, umm--" Understandably, Capa looked more than a little caught out. He shook his head. "I'm sorry-- uh, this isn't exactly my area of specialty--"

"The Son," Cassie said. Her voice sounded too loud in her ears; it echoed off the auditorium's white walls. But Capa looked up at her with open relief. She smiled at him. "Only the Son. Anyone else commits the sin of pride by doing so. Or by attempting to do so." She looked to Capa the elder a little shyly, suddenly self-aware, for confirmation. "Roughly? Approximately...?"

"You have your answer, Miss Markham," John Capa called up to the blonde girl. "Brief but fairly accurate."

Capa was still looking at Cassie. _Thank you,_ he mouthed.

"Miss Markham wrote a paper earlier in the unit in which she-- creatively-- set the _Icarus_ missions side-by-side with the malfeasance of Lucifer," Professor Capa continued. "Very interesting reading."

"Perhaps you'd like to see it," said Miss Markham, still looking down at Capa.

_The malfeasance or the paper?_ Cassie felt her nape-hairs stir. The girl was flirting, and that was bad enough, even if Capa, by his cool expression, was having none of it: something very awkward, very odd, was happening here--

"Thank you; I would. Cass, could you--"

"You can leave a copy of it with me," Cassie said to the girl, catching her attention as Capa slipped out the door.

"I'll do that," the girl said. Her eyes were a deep shale gray set with sparks and cold focus. Cassie nodded to her politely and settled into her seat. Below and to her right, seemingly paying no heed, the young man with light brown hair was working, pushing words with the brisk muscularity of a sketch artist, not a writer, onto the pages of his notebook.

* * *

"The Sisyphean ascent toward spring," John Capa intoned, watching from the window as the sleet outside turned to snow. "Sometimes there are setbacks."

He turned toward the interior of the long, high, cozy cavern he called his office. On the scarred battlefield of his ancient oaken desk, Cassie was stirring sugar into a large cardboard cup of tea.

"No refreshments _in situ_," he'd said, steering her from their slushy walk westward, toward the tea cafe in the student service center. "We'll need to stop."

He'd bought tea for himself and for Cassie, and a cup of coffee for Capa, on the off chance that he reached Gries Hall before they did. He bought the morning's remaining two croissants and two scones from the bakery case, too. Cassie caught him looking approvingly at her boots as they continued on their way: California might be her preferred abode, but she was still military-minded, and sensible at any rate, and she understood the virtues of Thinsulate, waterproofing, and freeze-proof soles.

Now she was breaking a piece from one of the scones while John Capa tried unsuccessfully to find his radio. A Vivaldi oboe concerto was playing from _somewhere_ on one of his lower bookshelves--

Cassie laughed, watching him peer behind, around, beyond clutter, stacks of papers, the spines of books double-parked on the heavy wooden shelves. Befuddled, he looked amazingly like Capa.

"John, don't bother. It's nice."

"I know, I know--" He made a move almost like a pounce for the spot behind the waste basket beside his desk. The radio wasn't there. "I'd just like to know where it hides itself. I'd swear the thing is sentient..."

"Come on: your tea's getting cold."

John Capa scratched the back of his neck, absently smiling his son's bemused smile as he abandoned his search. From its secret somewhere, the radio played on.

* * *

He took from the shelves books, papers, monographs, portfolios, and folders. Professor Capa brought the resulting stack to the desk, and Cassie cleared a starting spot and moved their cups. Then they stood shoulder-by-shoulder and looked over the treasures he'd acquired since her last visit to Marquette, careful with the food and drink, though nothing was of museum quality (any mint-condition volumes and editions were in his library back home, though even those weren't solely for reverence or show: in John's mind, printed matter was meant to be handled, read, and enjoyed). He chuckled as Cassie, mesmerized, brushed crumbs from a lithograph.

"You should finish your degree."

She smiled. "I'd like to."

"Do it. There aren't many of us left, you know."

She knew what he meant without having to ask. Words spoke differently from a printed page than they did from a screen. Their tones were richer, their timber more mellow, their cadences more graceful. Try as he might-- and she knew he tried, for her sake-- Capa couldn't absorb that. Graciously, he admitted as much. It was a gulf between them, if a minor one and harmless: he no more understood her love for fixed type than she understood more than half of what he'd write on a touchpad, working through an equation.

She sighed. "Sometimes I wonder if I married the wrong one."

"Stop right there." John sipped his tea. "You know the rules, Cassandra: this being my office, all flirting rights are, by default, mine as well."

Cassie looked at him devilishly. "Who said I was flirting...?"

"Oh, God-- I caught you. I _caught_ you."

They turned. Capa was standing in the doorway, his face stricken, a hand vise-gripped on each side of the frame. He glared from Cassie to his father--

-- who gallantly said: "The lady, sir, is blameless. The fault, I assure you, is entirely mine."

Capa stalked into the office, glowering. His eyes locked on Cassie like cold blue fire. His nostrils flared.

He reached around her and rummaged a croissant from the bakery bag.

"Mmm-- tasty," he said, taking a bite. He smiled as Cassie flicked crumbs from the front of his jacket.

"All finished with the science department?" his father asked.

"Mm hm." Capa drank from the cup Cassie offered him, glanced down at the printed treasures spread across his father's desk. "'Til tomorrow, anyway."

"Good. Let's go see what your mother has planned for dinner."

* * *

Capa didn't ask about Beth Markham's paper. That was her name-- Beth: she'd told Cassie over a handshake, a more formal introduction, as the paper file copied itself to Cassie's flashpad following John Capa's lecture. Her grip was bony and tight; Cassie thought she could see something predatory in the girl's expression. Her eyes seemed a little too bright. The boy who'd spent the class writing was waiting for her down the hall outside the double doors; they walked off together, talking. He glanced over his shoulder, just once, only briefly, at Cassie, where she stood outside the lecture hall, waiting for Capa's father to gather his things; something in his face made her shudder--

"Shall we--?" John Capa had said, touching her elbow.

"Sure. Yes." She smiled for him. She was thinking, though, of what she'd glimpsed on the screen of her flashpad--

_Fallen Son, Fallen Sun: Project Icarus and the Sin of Pride in Milton's_ Paradise Lost

Now Capa wasn't asking after it. Relaxed, by all appearances thoroughly content, he was chatting with his father as they pulled out into the snow falling on southbound Seventh. Flakes like ash, as large as quarters. Cassie had offered to sit in the back this time, in John Capa's car, some forty percent smaller than the Behemoth and yet as season-capable. She looked out at the late Michigan winter as they drove, and she listened to her husband's father talk happily with his son.

All the way home, to the house like a big two-story cabin just south of Carver Lake, Capa didn't ask about Beth Markham's paper.

Cassie didn't remind him.


	4. Chapter 4

"Don't--" Cassie said. She started awake--

Capa was looking at her with gentle concern. His hand was resting on her shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I--" A cold breeze on her face, a view of woods and snow beyond Capa's brown-jacketed torso. Snow spider-clinging to the side windows and windshield. She was still in John's car. "I dozed off."

"Yes, you did. It's okay; Dad still loves you." He gave her room, and Cassie got out of the car. "I still love you, too."

Cassie smiled at him. As they walked the snowy stone path leading to the broad steps up to the house's enclosed porch, she could feel him watching her: now that she was beginning to show, he was becoming protective. Not that he was overly solicitous, smothering, or patronizing-- of course not. But it was obvious that his identity as a new father-to-be was becoming clearer to him with every passing day, in a way it never had with regard to Charlie. Charlie was his biological son; Capa loved him as much as Charlie loved his better-late-than-never daddy. But they had for one another come pre-installed, as it were. A sort of mutual adoption or-- more accurately-- mutual adaptation that, fortunately, had worked out for everyone involved. More than that, really: Cassie would forever credit her returned love for the patience and unconditional affection he'd shown toward a little boy on the tantrum-prone far edge of the "terrible twos."

She took his hand as they walked, and she could feel his relief in the squeeze of his fingers around hers. Capa's hands were a bit of a puzzlement, slender but strong, the fingers long but heavy-knuckled and sturdy. Like the hands of a concert pianist who could moonlight as an amateur boxer. Cassie let him help her surreptitiously up the steps.

Inside, the house smelled of warmth and cooking. Savory scents from the kitchen, to the right from where she and Capa were standing, shrugging out of their jackets, pulling off their boots.

"I brought your bags in," Marjory called. "Your father put 'em up in Rosa's room. Hope that's okay."

"Aw, Mom--" Capa looked a little guilty as he hung their coats in the entryway closet. "You could have left them--"

"Didn't want 'em freezing in the B." Marge came to the doorway of the kitchen. She had on jeans and a rust-brown sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up over her sturdy forearms. She looked at Cassie and said, frankly: "You look a little worn out, honey."

"I am, actually," Cassie replied, realizing.

"Why don't you go up and lie down for a while? Robert can help me with dinner." Marge added, before Capa could ask: "Your father's in the library grading the latest masterpieces from the hooligans in his freshman Classics course. Come on; I feel like doting."

Capa looked to Cassie with a helpless shrug. In the moment before he was hauled into the kitchen, she planted a kiss on his full lips. Again he smiled. On this snowy day in March, they were home. All was well with the world.

* * *

As the older of the two Capa siblings, Rosa had enjoyed pride of place over her younger brother: the larger of the two secondary bedrooms had been hers as a matter of course. After she had married and moved to Australia, Marjory and John had outfitted the room as a guest bedroom. Capa's room was smaller, more sparsely furnished. In the brief few years between his adolescence and his participation in the second _Icarus_ mission, it had evolved from a bedroom into more of a storeroom. Books seemed to gravitate there. In the time he'd been missing, presumed dead, the room had become a place where things went to be forgotten. Even now it was hard to open the door. Once, on an earlier visit, just after Cassie and Capa had been married, she'd found Marjory standing in the doorway, looking in; Marge had gone to the room to retrieve an old set of photo chips, Capa and Rosa as kids, on a family trip to Costa Rica, and she was just standing there when Cassie came to check on her, gazing into her son's room with tears running down her cheeks.

Rosa's room, down the hall from Capa's, was at the northeast corner of the cabin's upper level. It had a good view of the surrounding woods, with windows looking out from both the north and east walls. In the trees outside, level with the windows, Capa had mounted an ingenious series of easy-fill feeders: Rosa was allergic to cats, and their father was allergic to dogs (or at least to puppies eating his shoes and his beloved books), and this way his sister could at least enjoy the chickadees and cardinals, the peeping red-headed finches and the grosbeaks. Someone had just filled the feeders before they arrived, by the look of things. As Cassie glanced out the eastern windows, a blue jay fixed her with one black bright eye before flitting off with a peanut in its sharp beak.

Their bags were lined up at the foot of the full bed. Cassie thought of unpacking, decided against it. Marjory had been right: she was feeling worn out. Cassie had for the most part avoided the standard-issue maladies of pregnancy, the nausea, bloating, and cramps, the sudden urgent dashes for the restroom, both now and when she had carried Charlie, but she was prone to tiredness. Her body would say _enough,_ and that was it. She needed a nap.

She stretched out on the blue knit coverlet, rested her head on the bed's left-side pillow, closed her eyes.

She opened them again. She rolled over, looked toward the dresser, heavy and rustically finished, matching the room's pine walls, where she'd left the tote that acted as her purse. Her flashpad inside. The paper she'd gotten from Beth Markham. It made her uncomfortable suddenly, knowing the words were there unread. Almost as though she'd brought something potentially dangerous into the house. It twisted in her gut, a flash of alarm, like seeing a spider on the wall when you switched on the light.

She sat up. Just a look, a quick skim. Just to make sure there was nothing--

Nothing _what_?

She lay back and listened, incredulous and not a little sheepish, to the beating of her heart. Miss Markham's paper would offer up nothing but the same purple prose Cassie had inflicted on her instructors in the two years that had passed before aeronautics drew her away from the humanities. The same self-important, overwritten, overblown nonsense. It wasn't witchcraft; it had little to no connection to real life. It could certainly wait the space of a nap, if not dinner.

Cassie went to sleep.

* * *

Mostly he wished she wasn't so angry.

Beth and Mike were back by four, after the Jacobean lit class they had together, and then the journo class after that. Paul thought of them as a couple more than he thought of Beth and himself as such. They were much more suited to each other temperamentally: if he could see that, so could they.

And that's why Mike, he knew, preferred to keep things as they were. At first Paul had thought Beth frail; she progressed, in his estimation, from "frail" to "brittle"; and by the time she reached "acidic," he couldn't bring himself to break up with her. He told himself he was good for her, that he was a calming center to her world (a phrase at which both she and Mike would laugh, were he to admit it to them). What it came down to, really, was two things: he stayed with her out of habit (admittedly, the sex they had was more than okay) and out of fear. He was afraid to break up with her. Another thing he'd never admit to either of them, even jokingly. Or even in anger.

They were coming in now, trailing cold damp air and shaking slushy snow from their jackets and book bags. Mike was Paul's roommate in Spooner Hall, sharing with him a corner apartment on the third floor. He occasionally shared Beth, too, on option, Paul hoped, to purchase. But he never quite got around to taking her off his hands, Beth seemed content to participate in what was never actually (in Paul's mind, anyway) a test of Paul's patience, and Paul couldn't summon enough energy to make a break.

He didn't turn as they came in. He stayed hunched over his datapad at his desk in the apartment's common area and tried to hide himself behind the wall of sound coming from his earbuds. Mike simply plucked out the one on the left. He leaned close to Paul and murmured: "She really made an ass of herself today in Capa's class."

"How's that?" Paul asked. He removed the other earbud and turned, warily bracing for the explosion that was sure to follow. Another way in which Paul knew himself essential to the not-quite-relationship that existed between his girlfriend and his roommate: while Paul was safe in terms of difference, in that his major was in engineering, Beth and Mike were both majoring in language arts. They shared classes and professors. They worked together on projects and papers (though Paul was more than half certain that Mike wrote the majority of the words Beth presented as her own). And, to put it bluntly, they fought. What transpired between them wasn't the exhilaration of academic exchange, though it was heady and both of them obviously got off on it: it was a long-term, lasting war. Over differences in grades, paper topics, answers given in class, they sparred or sniped or, like now, attacked outright. Paul knew he was central to their conflict, though he was in no way the cause. When the barbs pierced too deeply (metaphorically, of course), Paul was always there, patient and even-tempered, to salve the cuts.

"_He_ was there." Mike was tall and too thin, and when he was excited his gestures were jerky and broad, his movements those of a skeletal puppet. "The sun-god himself. Young Apollo. Our savior, come to Earth on this snowy day."

"Fuck you, Mike," Beth said.

"Not before dinner, darling," replied Mike, hanging his coat.

"Robert Capa was there?" Paul asked. To one degree or another, every person on Earth could claim an interest in John Capa's son: some, like Paul, found fascination in the science through which the younger Capa had saved the world, while others, like Beth, were fascinated by the man himself. He was younger than he should have been, to have shouldered (and shouldered successfully) so heavy a task, and he was handsome after the romantic fashion of poets who died young, slender and hollow-cheeked, his wideset eyes a shocking pale blue. The managers of Project Icarus had made him the "face" of the endeavor, over the three who had survived with him, the second mission's pilot, their mechanic, and their navigator; however, though they in no way shared Robert Capa's visibility, Loinnir Whitby, Stephen Mace, and Edward Trey enjoyed his degree of protection. The third level of interest in Robert Capa and his colleagues: that of religious extremists, who considered the saving of the sun an act of heresy or blasphemy. When the _Icarus II_ and her crew had been considered lost, the point was moot; when the mission's four survivors had shown up in a lifepod a year and a half ago, their malfunctioning communications system to blame for the surprise of their return, the world's religious leaders convened to draw up a pact, as it were, with regard to the mission's young physicist and his co-saviors. _Do not touch,_ the pact said. If nothing else, the resurrection of the sun had given the warring factions of the Earth's religions the chance to fight another day.

"In the cadaverous flesh." Mike had ice-blue eyes that brought out the red in his fair hair, and full lips that pulled too easily into a sneer. They were thus pulled now. "He had his wife with him. The _other_ reason our Elizabeth is pissed--"

Without a word, Beth, unpacking her book bag, hurled at Mike's head a hardbound volume of linguistics theory. The book slapped into the wall next to Paul's desk. He picked it up and smoothed the pages before setting it on the desk next to his datapad. When Beth was calm enough to want it, she would come and get it.

"What's the first reason?" he asked, as though hurled objects were a part of everyday life in apartment 312-- which, truth be told, they more or less were.

"I asked him--" Beth began.

"She asked him 'the question,'" Mike finished.

Paul probed cautiously: "The question about--"

"The right hand of God," Beth said.

He heard something in her voice, saw it nearly like a shimmer in the air around her: a shakiness, a slight flutter. She looked like someone who'd been carried along on a flood of adrenaline only to be eddied into a backwater of disappointment. For all he realized he was apt to trigger her anger by replying, Paul felt sorry for her.

"He doesn't know Milton, Beth," he said. "He's a math geek. He's never read _Paradise Lost_."

"Gets better, actually," said Mike, flopping onto the sofa with one of his battered omnipresent notebooks and a pen. "His wife had to answer for him. Shit answer, too."

"Yeah." Beth brightened a bit. "It was a shitty answer, wasn't it?"

She looked across at Mike. They shared what could only be described as an anti-smile, and Paul felt his heart chill in his chest even as he felt a certain sick relief: now that the two of them had a common enemy, that being the absent hapless Mrs. Capa, peace would reign in the apartment, if uneasily, at least for the time being.

"He's going to open the new physics wing tomorrow night, isn't he? Capa?" Mike was the only person Paul knew who could write while he talked. He was working in his notebook in a manner that suggested the sketching of lewd cartoons.

"Uh, yeah." Paul reached for his earbuds.

"You want to go?" Mike cast a glance between the two of them.

Surprised suddenly to find themselves allied, Paul and Beth exchanged a look. Beth was the first to respond.

"Not especially," she said, coolly.

"We can watch it from here," Paul added, more diplomatically.

Mike kept his eyes on Beth, who was digging her datapad from her bookbag and for whom, apparently, the question was settled.

"Probably safer that way," he said.

At least that's what he might have said. Paul had his earbuds back in place, and he only half-heard.

* * *

Cassie woke to a kiss on the lips. "Dinnertime," Capa said softly, smiling down at her. "Sleep well?"

"Yeah." Cassie sat up, stretched. Her eyes went to the dresser. Her tote was there, exactly as she'd left it. She got up, and she and Capa went down to dinner.

* * *

It was a typical supper at the Capa house. Unable to decide between one entree and another, Marjory had done what she usually did and made a little bit of everything, a meal strategy that John Capa typically referred to as "a six-car culinary pileup." They had a couscous dish with fine-chopped vegetables, veggie-and-tofu cutlets for Capa and anyone else so inclined, sauteed strips of chicken, portobello-stuffed tortellini, and salad. It was an indulgent quantity of food, but it was all good, and Cassie was very hungry. She knew, too, from her own experience as a mother, how much pleasure Marge took in watching her son eat. Capa seemed only too happy to indulge her.

After dinner, coffee and chat by the stone-chimneyed fireplace in the living area. The lights were cozy and low, and the glow from the fire bobbed shadows up the walls and into the high rafters. Marge served up crumbly pieces of berry cobbler in stoneware dessert bowls. She caught Capa and Cassie staring dreamily at the fire and smiled from her sprawling comfortable wreck of an armchair.

"Suppose I should make the public-service announcement," she said, picking at her cobbler with her fork. "If you two are planning on getting up to the same mischief you got up to last time you were here--"

John chuckled from his place on the heavy deep-green loveseat. "For heaven's sake, Marge--"

"-- even if it did lead-- I do believe-- to certain positive consequences," Marjory continued, with a meaningful glance at Cassie's belly, "those of us with whom you share this humble house would appreciate you giving a heads-up if you're going to fool around by the fire. Put a flag out on our door or something--"

"Mom--!" Capa blurted.

Marge held up her fork. _Silence,_ said her brows. "I don't mind you enjoying yourselves. It's good to know you're getting along." Her hazel eyes caught twinkles from the firelight. "Just keep in mind: this _is_ a public thoroughfare. People pass through here, you know."

"Yes, Mom."

Next to Capa on the sofa, Cassie knew her cheeks had gone just as red as his. But she was laughing to herself, looking at the berries in her dish, as they finished their dessert.

* * *

A trilling from the video den. Charlie calling, courtesy of his California grandma, to say goodnight. They all went in. For his parents, Elaine Cassidy had a request to forward, on behalf of Charlie's "sparents": Dave and Jen wanted to take him to Sea World.

"They wanted to make sure it was alright with you, Cass," Elaine said. She was very much her daughter's mother, younger than her years, dark-haired. Her brown eyes shone at them from eighteen hundred miles away.

"Sure, Mom." Cassie looked, briefly, to Capa. "It's fine."

Elaine smiled. Then Charlie was back on, his sweet young face filling the screens--

"Story, Daddy!"

Capa grinned. "Okay, Chuckles."

Cassie got up, kissed Capa on the cheek. She said to her son: "Night, sweetie. Sleep tight."

"Night, Momma."

She left Capa alone with his son, their baby's image on the same three triptyched screens on which Marjory and John had viewed their son's messages from the _Icarus II_. In the hallway outside the den, his face catching the soft blue glow from the screens inside, John asked her, genuinely curious: "What kinds of stories does he tell?"

"What's the thing he knows best?"

John looked at Cassie unbelievingly. "You're joking--"

"It's the Particle Zoo." They went to the kitchen and finished up with the clearing away. Marjory had already started loading the dishwasher. "There's the protons and electrons and neutrons, the leptons and the mesons and the muons-- Charlie's especially fond of the muons-- and they're red and blue, and they spin, and they stick together and fly apart, and some of them are strange, and they have all sorts of adventures."

"He's teaching physics to a four-year-old."

"Charlie's eating it up." Cassie closed the dishwasher. "Robert says he's grasping it far more easily than most adults do. By the time we're grown, the concepts are so counter-intuitive that we simply can't get a grip on them. He says the ideas are more fantastic than anything he could make up. Add a few nicknames-- Demeter Meson, the Big Moo, Ellis the Electron-- and it all makes sense." She chuckled. "To a preschooler, anyway."

"He should write a children's book," John said, brewing himself another cup of coffee.

"He should. Not sure how that would go over with his peers, though."

Capa senior smiled, stirring cream into his cup. "As if he could do any wrong in their eyes."

* * *

After storytime, Capa went to work for a time on the lectures he was to give at the University of Minnesota. Cassie picked at random a book from John Capa's library and took it with her up to bed. She fell asleep reading the poetry of William Blake.

* * *

She woke to snow-muffled silence from a slumber peaceful and heavy. The volume of Blake she had borrowed from John's library was on the nightstand near her head, closed, the page marked with a slip of paper. Capa wasn't with her. Even as she realized it, she heard his voice downstairs, calling:

"Mom, where are my snowshoes?"

"In the mudroom, honey!" Marjory's voice called back.

Cassie turned her head far enough on her pillow to see the bedside alarm clock. Seven-twenty. Nowhere near the time at which she'd need to prepare for the reception at NMU's new physics facility. She smiled muzzily. Then she rolled over, closed her eyes, and indulged in the luxury dearest to the parent of a four-year-old: she went back to sleep.

* * *

By nine o'clock, nonetheless, she was up. She did yoga, showered, found herself some breakfast. She was alone in the house. John was at the university, and was to meet them later, at the reception. Marjory was working a half-shift. And Capa had yet to return from his ramble in the woods.

The house was silent in a way that one never heard in San Diego. No traffic, no buzz of insects outside. Cassie relaxed into it. She made herself a mug of tea and went to settle herself in an overstuffed old monster of a leather-clad armchair in the depths of John Capa's library.

* * *

She'd just paged her way into a volume of Mark Twain-- _A Tramp Abroad,_ the story about the befuddled jay and the cabin full of acorns seeming appropriate, given the avian activity at the feeders outside the windows in Rosa's room-- when she remembered Beth Markham's paper. She paused in her reading; she frowned--

She closed the book and went upstairs to get her flashpad.

* * *

"Dad would be disappointed," Capa said.

Cassie started. She nearly dropped her flashpad; she just as nearly knocked her mug off the lamp table.

"I'm sorry--" Capa continued, apologetically. He was dressed in old jeans and a layering of t-shirts and sweatshirts, and he'd sweated through the top layer on his jaunt. There was a light dusting of frost on his chest. His cheeks were ruddy. "Are you okay, Cass?"

"Yeah." She tried a smile. "You surprised me, that's all."

"I was just saying, Dad would be disappointed if he caught you reading from a pad, what with all of his beautiful books right--" Capa stopped. He looked at her, his brushy brows lowering in a concerned frown. He came closer; his eyes moved to Cassie's flashpad. "What are you reading?"

"Nothing," she lied. She continued before he could put words to the bemused look on his face: "It's the paper that girl in your father's class left with me."

"Oh." Capa reached casually for the flashpad.

Cassie held it away from him. "I'm not finished with it," she said.

He smiled, reaching again. "Just let me have a look--"

"I thought you weren't interested."

She wanted to tell him her thoughts on the paper, but didn't quite know how. She'd lied, too, about not having finished it; this was in fact her second time through. On the first pass, she'd seen what she'd expected to see: an organization less than logical, arguments lacking substantiation, phrasing lodged somewhere between "overblown" and "clumsy." On the second go-round, however, she noticed the tone: intimate and insinuating, detached yet oddly cruel. Very much despite herself, despite all her memories of the self-important scribblings she'd generated during her own college years, Cassie had found herself thinking, over and over: _How dare you--?_

Capa plucked the flashpad from her hands. She stared at him as his eyes flicked across the screen. His expression worked its way from a frown to a bemused smile.

"Cass, she's comparing me to Lucifer."

In his tone she heard the reminder she hadn't used on herself: she was pregnant and hormonal and therefore given to moods. He wasn't criticizing; he wasn't being sarcastic. He was simply pointing out what he sensibly perceived to be the chemical and emotional underpinning of the situation. She didn't say "I know."

She said, instead, carefully and quietly: "The most beautiful of the Host. The most faithful of God's angels, and His most beloved, until he presumed to place himself above the Son."

The Son.

_The sun_.

"He claimed his place at God's right hand, and when God denied him that place, he and his followers started a war in Heaven. God in retribution cast them down, and for nine days and nights they fell, until, hideously transformed, they reached the Pit, where light and darkness were one. Lucifer was the most tragic of the fallen. He was the first of the self-righteous: having been banished from God's righteousness, he had no other choice."

"Meaning what?" Capa, perhaps understandably, looked a little confused. He placed the flashpad on the lamp table near Cassie's mug and dropped lightly to his haunches by her chair. He looked up into her face. "I don't speak 'sophomore English,' Cass. What are you saying...?"

"I'm not sure."

"Do you think she wants to fuck me?"

The words seemed to shock him as much as they did her. Then, in the silence that followed, when Cassie didn't reply, the obverse practically spoke itself--

"Do you think I want to fuck her?"

Cassie stared at him, her heart burning with an anger as quick and poisonous as cobalt. "I shouldn't have come along," she said, very quietly.

For a moment, Capa looked away. Cassie watched him. She watched him breathe. She could count his heartbeats by the pulse in his throat. Her own heart was knocking painfully in her chest; she could feel tears starting in her eyes.

Capa's expression softened. "Would certainly have given me more time alone with my groupies, that's for sure." He looked up, tried a smile as his eyes met hers. She looked back at him coldly.

"Jesus, Cass," Capa said. "I'm kidding--"

He reached for her; she pulled away. His fingertips brushed the air roughly an inch from her cheek. He lowered his hand, and for another moment he remained where he was, looking at her. Then he stood.

"I should get cleaned up," he said. "I need to finish my notes for tonight." He swayed slightly on his feet; she could sense his hesitation. She said nothing. She reached for her book, not looking at him, and Capa turned and walked out.

Cassie stayed where she was. She left the volume of Twain on the lamp table. She powered off her flashpad and took a numb sip of her cooling tea. The tannins caught around an ache in her her throat. She set down her mug and started to cry.

* * *

Capa was back less than a minute later.

* * *

He walked in quietly and knelt on the floor in front of her. Gently, he pushed her sweater away from her waist, carefully unfastened her trousers. He said nothing; Cassie silently consented to him touching her. He proceeded to nuzzle and caress her swelling belly, to kiss and lick and nibble at her exposed skin. He moved slowly, his touch absolutely tender, his eyes half-closed, his expression reverent. The effect was exquisite. Finally, Cassie stopped him. She brushed her fingers into his hair, and when Capa raised his head and looked up at her, she leaned down, took his face in her hands, and kissed him deeply.

"Mmm--" His moan and hers, shared, from well back in their throats. She shifted forward in the chair as Capa drew her into his arms. They kissed slowly and hungrily, pulling one another closer, until Cassie was still seated but Capa was pressed against her, between her thighs. She slipped a hand between their bodies, to the inside of Capa's thigh, reaching low and then sliding her palm upward, nuzzling his throat as she did, being nuzzled in return, wanting to feel him, wanting to hear his breath catch--

And she did.

"Oh, God-- Cass--"

He kissed her, his breathing growing rough, as Cassie stroked him through his jeans. He stopped her, though, before she took him too far; he slid his hand gently over hers and stilled it, though he stayed as he was, his hardness pressed openly into her grasp.

"Only for you, Cassie," he murmured. He gazed into her eyes. "Always for you."

She looked back at him, and again she moved her hand, a slow, circular rubbing with her palm. Capa groaned softly, helplessly. He was touching her, caressing her face. Cassie smiled, tenderly brushed his parted lips with hers.

"Let's go back to bed," she whispered.

* * *

Her sex drive had been waning with the waxing of her pregnancy. She hadn't realized just how much until now, once she and Capa had removed themselves to Rosa's room and, having arrived, busied themselves removing each other's clothes. She trembled at his every touch; he was trembling at hers. She could sense how desperately he was trying to pace himself, to temper his lust. But it was a fact, pure and simple: their bodies missed one another.

"I want you, Cass," Capa murmured. He drew her down onto the bed, kissing her, caressing her. "I want you, I want you, I want you..."

No better aphrodisiac, none in the world, than to feel sincerely and lovingly desired. She wanted him on top of her, so that's where Capa positioned himself. She smiled at how careful he was, as he drew her thighs widespread over his, as he pushed forward and entered and slowly filled her--

"-- ohh," he gasped, looking in her eyes, smiling back--

-- to keep his weight off of her belly.

* * *

_Told you so,_ her body said.

Not just after their first coupling but now, too, after their second, when she'd taken her turn on top, straddling him while Capa was still gasping from his first orgasm but his body was more than ready to try for another. She took what she wanted from him, greedily but tenderly, and when he could hold back no longer, he sat forward, groaning, and caught her in his arms, and Cassie clung to him desperately, her cheek pressed to his hair, as her body shuddered its last, most intense release in time with his.

So: the height from which she was drifting now. Post- the post-coital kissing, caressing, gazing. Post-withdrawal, Capa panting softly and looking at her almost shyly as his body slowly parted company with hers. Post-consciousness, then, finally, as Cassie rolled onto her side and Capa spooned himself against her and slipped his arm around her waist, and they dozed off in the bed in Rosa's room with snowflakes silently brushing the windowpanes.

* * *

He woke realizing he'd not eaten.

"_Food,_ that is," he clarified, looking at her with devilment in his blue eyes.

Cassie gently punched his chest, chuckling. She'd turned herself to face him as they slept. She lingered for a moment longer in the warm nest they'd made for themselves in the sheets and blankets, looking at him, her fine, handsome love. Then she eased clear and sat up.

"Why don't you take a shower? I'll make you some breakfast."

"Okay." Capa made no immediate move to get up. He reached out and trailed the fingertips of his left hand gently down her arm. His expression was sleep-dusted and tender. "I'm more than half-tempted to call in sick," he murmured.

"To the opening?"

"Mm hm."

She might have taken him up on it, made his excuses for him in fact, then spent a long, snowy afternoon and evening tending to his needs (as he, in turn, she was certain, would tend to hers). Had they been anywhere else, she'd be on the vidlink even now, conveying his apologies to the event's organizers. But tonight's opening was on behalf of both Capa's university and John's, and Cassie knew how much it meant to both of them, father and son.

"What do you say we go, you give the opening address, we put in an appearance at the reception...?" Cassie leaned down, kissed the corner of his mouth. "Then, later, maybe we can break a few of your mom's rules regarding 'public thoroughfares.'"

Capa smiled. "It's a date." He added, regarding her with his clear eyes from his contented backflat spot, before she could again straighten away: "I love you, Cassie."

"I love you, too, Robert." Cassie touched her lips to his, just a whisper of contact, a tiny spark. Then she got out of bed, took her robe from the closet and found her slippers, and went downstairs to make his breakfast.

* * *

It was still snowing when they rode in the Behemoth back to NMU.

"This one is _not_ letting up," Marjory said, an eye on the weather, sounding gruff but unconcerned as she navigated the white backroads.

"Maybe come June," Capa commented drolly, from the cavernous back seat.

"You _did_ make sure the pilot light was still on before you left the sun, didn't you, Robert?"

Cassie chuckled. She could hear Capa's smile in his voice as he replied:

"If I didn't, Mom, I'm not going back to check."


	5. Chapter 5

"Ought to be at least one good drink in the bunch," said Mike, conjuring bottles from the depths of his long coat. Wine, four bottles in all.

"Where did you get that?" Paul asked, leaning into the kitchen doorway and watching as Mike lined the bottles up on the counter.

"Conklin."

Conklin Hall. The new physics facility, where, in less than twenty minutes, Robert Capa was due to give his opening address to his visiting colleagues and to the students and science faculty of Northern Michigan U.

Paul stared. "Mike-- I mean, _shit_--"

Mike grinned. "Not like they'll miss it. Delivery truck was still at the side door, boxes were everywhere. The caterers must've been delayed on account of the weather. Everyone's zipping back and forth. I just walked in and took it. Got something else, too." He leaned past Mike in the doorway and called to Beth, who was seated on the floor between the screens of the video unit in the common area, synchronizing the CampusNet feeds from Conklin. "Hey, Beth, c'mere."

Beth got up, came over. "Wow--" she said, looking past Mike and Paul to the bottles next to the kitchen sink.

"Wait," said Mike. "There's more. Low-res always goes down better with chemical assistance--"

"I thought that's what the wine was for." Paul didn't like what he saw in his roommate's face. Mike was never more apt to be up to something than when he looked as he looked now: open, eager to please, a little too excited.

"Well, wine goes better with this, too." From his pocket, Mike took a small foil packet. He opened it carefully and showed the contents to Paul and Beth. Within the spread silver wings of foil in his palm lay six tiny squares of blue paper.

"Luna," he said. "Two hits for each of us."

L-pronezapam-a. Luna. A powerful tranquilizer when used as prescribed on animals. A fairly potent hallucinogen when ingested, against the dictates of common sense and the Food and Drug Administration, by humans.

"Michael," purred Beth, "how considerate of you." She leaned up, her eyes shining, and kissed Mike's cheek.

"What are you doing, Mike?" Paul asked suspiciously.

"When's the last time you saw me spring for treats?" Mike smiled, met Paul's eyes earnestly. "Never, right?"

"Well-- next to never."

"Right. So it's my turn." He went back to the counter, carefully set the Luna near the bottles of wine. Then he was in the jumble of the cutlery drawer, digging for the corkscrew. "Tonight's going to be special."

* * *

From the outside, thought Cassie, Conklin Hall looked like something you could pack with little or no fanfare into the recycling bin. It was beautiful, though, too, in a multi-post-modern, organic way. The soaring exterior walls were surfaced in hammered pseud-aluminum; the west-facing entrance side was a cathedral-rise of glass. When the snow ended and the clouds parted, the building would be a celebration of light, from the dawn glow drifting across the multi-planed roof to the sunsets casting their final rays across the ground-floor lobby. All at the discretion of the scientists and teachers within, of course: the energy-efficient glass that made up the building's west wall was designed not only for precise temperature control, it could filter itself, in minute degrees, from utter translucence to total opacity. Tonight the window-wall was completely unfiltered; tonight Conklin Hall was the sun, if not the moon, to its snow-muffled surroundings, casting light out at the campus and woods.

They set up camp in a lounge on the ground floor that was doubling as the night's green room. Cassie stood in the doorway, watching the arrivals, the scuttling of the caterers, the millings at the coat-check and the bar. She was nursing a glass of cranberry juice over ice; Capa was nervously sipping from a glass of water as he took a final look at his notes. John brought glasses of red wine for himself and Marjory and offered to fetch one for Capa as well; Capa politely declined.

"For now," he said. "Let's see who turns up first. I may need to keep my wits about me."

"That's odd," Marge said, looking functional but lovely and slightly bohemian in a paisley jacket in deep purple and gray and green over trim black slacks. She glanced into her glass before looking wryly Capa's way. "Physics always seems to make more sense to me after I've had a few."

Cassie laughed, then made way as a young man in a black suit politely passed her in the doorway.

"Professor Capa?"

In what was becoming a pattern, both Capas, father and son, turned in unison. John cleared his throat deferentially and stepped aside; Capa said: "Yes?"

"It's time, sir. This way, please."

"Of course." Capa set down his glass, pocketed his notes. He nodded to his father and mother and headed for the door.

Cassie set down her own glass. "Wait." She stopped Capa just inside the door; she straightened his collar and tie, reached up and gently smoothed the hair at his temples.

He watched her tenderly as she ministered to him. "You look beautiful, Cass," he said.

A simple black dress, travel-friendly but formal enough, a light black shawl. An uncomplicated silver necklace. She had her hair up, too. That was all.

She could see in his eyes, though: it was quite enough for him.

"So do you," she replied.

* * *

Somewhere between "I'm honored to be here" and "Thank you for joining us tonight," Capa became distracted by someone in the audience. His comments regarding Conklin Hall were sincere but brief-- not that he feared speaking before groups, but, as he told Cassie and Marge, as an aside, just before he stepped up to the podium at the center of the main hall, half the attendees no doubt were keen to tour the facility while the rest were there for the bar: no one was there to hear a speech-- and by the time Cassie had made her way casually but curiously to the spot in the crowd where Capa had kept looking, the polite clapping had already begun.

She came up behind a couple, a man and a woman, at what she thought had been the epicenter of Capa's attention. The woman was about Cassie's height, slender in a sensible but elegant midnight-blue dress, with dark brown hair cascading down her back; the man was a bit taller than his companion but not tall, and black-haired, and he was wearing-- of all things-- a dark purple sharkskin jacket.

"Jesus, I thought he'd never shut up," he was saying, as he and the woman shared a laugh. He took her arm. "C'mon, I need a drink."

They turned. Bristling, Cassie braced herself to say something arch or indignant or chilly. Instead, she found herself smiling--

"Trey--!"

Edward Trey, navigator of the _Icarus II,_ stared at her open-mouthed. Then he grinned, reached out, and caught her in a hug. "Cassie!"

Cassie hugged him back. Although the survivors of the second _Icarus_ mission and their families stayed in touch, in Cassie's opinion they met each other in the flesh all too infrequently. She was genuinely happy to see Trey. She noted, too, from the gentle, even pressure on her back and torso, how skillfully he was using his prosthetic right arm. He'd lost the real one to burns and gangrene on the long voyage home from the sun.

"Umm--" After a moment, Trey drew back a bit, looking a little uncertain. "You didn't happen to hear, Cass, what I, umm-- what I just said about--"

"About Robert Capa being the most boring speaker on the planet--?" his companion suggested. She was looking past Cassie and Trey with turquoise-blue eyes. "At least he's learned to _enunciate_," she continued--

-- as Capa walked up and smothered her in an embrace. He looked sheepish but pleased. His ear-tips were pink. "Jesus, Elena, broadcast it, why don't you--?"

"'Mumbles Capa,' we used to call him," said the woman called Elena, rocking him playfully in her arms. "Might be the smartest guy on the planet if you could only understand even half of what he said."

Capa smiled. "Cassie, this is Elena Wagner," he said, as he and Elena mutually disengaged. "Elena, my wife, Captain Cassandra Cassidy."

"How do you do?" Elena's smile was genuine as she reached for a handshake. Cassie, easing clear of Trey, reached and smiled back. "Gosh," Elena added, "that's a real 'gee-thanks-Mom-and-Dad' kind of name, isn't it?"

"I misspoke," Capa said, smoothly. "I meant to say 'Cassie, this is Elena "Filter-Free" Wagner.'"

Cassie laughed. "It's alright. At least my middle name's not 'Catherine.'"

"I worked with Elena's mother on the payload for the _Icarus I_," Capa said, his voice becoming a bit more sober.

"And, to answer the question you look too polite to ask," Elena added, to Cassie, "no, we're not old flames. I had a crush, but he and Mom had their bomb--"

"Don't let her fool you, Cass," Capa interjected. "Elena's a fine scientist in her own right."

"-- and-- why, thank you, Professor Capa-- to make a long story short--"

"Too late," intoned Trey.

"-- nothing ever came of it," Elena finished, deftly parking a sharp elbow in Trey's ribs. "Other than the fact that I've since developed a theory that the whole thing-- the entire Icarus Project-- was nothing more than a hoax."

Cassie looked to Capa, perplexed. "How are you, Trey?" Capa asked abruptly, looking pointedly at his former crewmate.

"_Smooth,_ Robert," Elena breathed, smiling.

"Other than the punctured lung?" Trey asked, rubbing his bruised side.

"Yes, indeed."

"I'm at Ann Arbor, teaching bio-comp and basic programming to the next generation of geeks."

"I asked 'how,' not 'where.'"

Trey's face was inscrutable. "And I thought I answered the question."

He looked at Capa for a long, unreadable moment. Then his face split in a grin. He put an arm around Capa's shoulders and turned him in the direction of the bar.

"C'mon, let's get something to drink."

* * *

_They were on-camera_. Cassie found herself looking for the telltale red blinks, the tiny, shiny black nodules. CampusNet had equipment everywhere but in the restrooms, and now those who had tuned in on their three-dees to see the world-famous Robert Capa give his speech for the opening of Conklin Hall could stay and watch two hundred eggheads become inebriated. He was behaving himself, though, Capa was: he'd had a glass of white wine and then joined Cassie in the land of the cranberry. Trey and Elena, for the most part, were watching themselves, too, for two very sensible and interrelated reasons: the weather was terrible, even though they had only to drive to downtown Marquette to reach their hotel, and they couldn't make up their minds as to who was to be the designated driver. Or, more importantly to the here and now, the designated drinker.

Capa looked from Trey to Elena. "So," he said, finally asking, "are you two..."

"Yes," said Trey. "No--"

"Sort of," Elena finished. She smiled mischievously at him, then turned to Capa and Cassie. Her eyes went to Cassie's belly, subtle in its swelling though it was-- no doubt she'd been noting what Cassie had been drinking, too-- and said: "Looks like you two have been up to no good yourselves--"

"And, yes, it's a boy or a girl," Marjory said, approaching from the side. She smiled widely at Trey. "Hello, Edward. Good to see you."

* * *

Capa got drawn away on one of the lab tours, and Elena and John went with him, the three of them talking up great clouds of syllables as they left. With Trey and Marjory, Cassie stayed to mingle in the reception area. She wasn't getting tired, and she was enjoying herself, but by the time Capa returned, she was feeling a bit stifled.

"Do you want to go?" Capa asked, looking at her with gentle concern.

"You could take the Behemoth," Marjory said to her son. "I can catch a ride home with your father."

"No, it's alright." Cassie smiled for the two of them. She asked Capa: "Could we step outside for a minute, get some air?"

"Sure." Capa smiled back at her. "I'll get our coats."

* * *

It should have been boring as hell, watching Robert Capa, Their Savior, the little skinny blue-eyed geek, yammer at his geek buddies. Should have been even more boring than hell watching him and his buddies drink up the booze Mike had left behind.

But Luna made everything... _interesting_.

It was like being in the room with them. Being able to walk through them. To slip between the spaces in their atoms. At one point, it was like she was _right there_--

Mrs. Capa.

Cassie.

"Cassie," Paul whispered, an echo of the name he'd heard from her friend, the Asian guy Trey--

For a moment, she looked directly into one of the cameras, and in the depths of her dark eyes he could see tiny lights like fireflies on a June night, like sparks rising up off a beach bonfire into a powdery dusk sky. She was _beautiful_.

No wonder Beth had been pissed. Paul giggled-- then caught himself, afraid (but not really: he giggled again) that Beth would sense--

-- _feel_--

-- what he was thinking. Luna was like that. But Beth said nothing, and stayed where she was, curled comfortably against him on the floor in front of the couch, and that was good, too. Being with her when she was calm and quiet and content. Or stoned and drunk on good stolen wine. Either-or, it worked.

"I've gotta do something." Behind them, Mike languidly unfolded himself from the couch. His knee bumped the back of Paul's head as he got up, but Paul didn't mind. "Be right back."

"Okay," said Paul.

"Mind if I take your coat?"

That, Paul decided, was okay too.

* * *

The snow was falling steadily, almost more as drops than flakes. Sponged with moisture. It was like being pelted with tiny water balloons. Capa and Cassie kept to the sidewalk; he ushered her to shelter in an alcove near a double-wide delivery door on Conklin's east side. The parkway leading back to the campus proper curved away before them. Snow streaked like meteor showers through the pools of light cast by the streetlamps.

Capa patted his jacket pockets. "Damn--" he said, mildly.

"What is it?" Cassie asked.

"Do you have your phone with you? I forgot mine."

"Sure. Here." Cassie dug her phone from her bag, handed it over. She watched as Capa activated the vid recorder. "What are you--"

"Snow. For Charlie." Capa smiled as he pointed the phone at the pelting whiteness. "It's nearly time for his night-night call. He'll love this."

"It's too dark out here," Cassie chided gently. "He won't be able to see a thing."

"No. See--?" He brought the phone screen close enough for Cassie to see, played back the last seconds of the recording. "It looks fine."

"You're right. It does." Cassie nodded, too, a triple concurrence. Then, as Capa continued his recording, she turned her attention to the ground near their feet. She bent down and scooped up a double handful of wet snow.

"Cass--" Capa eyed her sidewise and dubiously. "Cass, what are you doing...?"

"Seems a little dull, just snow." Cassie patted the snow into a blob about the size of a baseball. "Maybe we should liven it up a bit."

Capa backed away on the snowy sidewalk. Four or five paces. Casually. Six paces, seven. His back was to the parkway.

"I have nothing to fear," he said, calmly. Not quite as calmly he eyed the snowball. "You throw like a girl."

The snowball caught him with staggering force square in the chest.

"Son of a--" -- he stopped himself: the phone was still recording, and Robert Capa was nothing if not a role model for his son-- "-- _ouch_--!"

He reached down and with the practiced ease of a boy who'd grown up in this snowy hell rolled for himself one-handed a white cannonball. Cassie shrieked--

"Robert, stop-- You can't--" She fixed him with wide, fearful eyes. "I'm _pregnant_--!"

Capa froze. He dropped the snowball, mortified--

"I'm sorry, Cassie. God, I'm sorry. I wasn't think--"

-- as Cassie bent calmly down and rolled herself another snowball. Capa tracked her movements with blue-saucer eyes. Half-laughing, half-alarmed. An entire psych text's-worth of thoughts and emotions cascaded across his face. He wasn't Mace. By this time, Mace, who was immune to all but the most potent b.s., would have had her buried with shots. Capa was slightly less guff-proof. More than that, he was sometimes slightly too polite for his own good. Now was such a time.

"Cass, you little--"

"Mind the recording, sweetheart," Cassie said, casually.

"-- _hypocrite_--!"

"Yup." She smirked. Then she added, watching as Capa backed away and then turned and, frankly, bolted: "Oh, you _better_ run..."

She let him steal a little distance before she let fly. Let him think he could escape, let him feel his racing heart thrill at the belief that her throw went wide, that his would-be destruction had terminated as a wet white splatter on a tree trunk, a soft _whumph_ on the ground behind his scrambling feet. Someone was approaching along the sidewalk from the direction of the parkway and the campus, hunched in a long dark coat, a latecomer, likely, to the reception, but Cassie wasn't worried. The newcomer was quite safe. Elaine Cassidy's daughter hadn't played all those years of softball for nothing.

She hauled back and threw. The snowball disappeared into the swirling white camouflage filling the dark air. _Three_.

He was still running, but now he realized he wasn't alone on the sidewalk. Capa slowed up slightly. Cassie read relief in the casual loosening of his back and shoulders. Surely, he was thinking, she wouldn't throw now, when there was a danger of hitting someone else--

_Two_.

"Dr. Capa, I presume?" the stranger said. A young man's voice, clear but slightly muffled in the clean, snow-filled air.

_One_.

The snowball hit Capa right between the shoulder blades. White exploded dead-center on the back of his black dress coat.

"Yes--" Capa staggered off the path, obviously stunned but just as obviously laughing. "Pardon me; I'm sorry, I--"

He straightened, trying to salvage his dignity. He shook out his coat. The stranger stepped off the path, too, to help.

At least that's what Cassie thought.

Capa's back was to her. She couldn't see his face. She couldn't see the stranger's face, either: he and Capa were between streetlamps, in a patch of darkness the pools of light couldn't reach. She saw the stranger's right shoulder swing back. He ducked slightly. She saw his right arm snap forward, and she saw Capa's body jerk with the contact, saw his torso fold itself around the blow--

"_Robert_--!"

The stranger looked her way. She read surprise in his body language, not in his face. She still couldn't see his face. She ran toward them, and he shoved clear of Capa and ran back the way he'd come.

Capa didn't move to follow him. When Cassie reached him, he was standing, slightly bent over, a few feet off the path. He was panting. Cassie took his arm, steadied him.

"Sweetie, are you okay--?"

Capa didn't reply. He looked in shock and fury after the stranger. The man was nearly out of sight. His feet made no sound on the snowy paving. He moved like a shadow.

"He tried to punch me in the groin," Capa said, incredulously. Then he patted his jacket pockets and added, even more incredulously: "He took my wallet. Son of a _bitch_--"

He moved to break away, to give chase.

"No--" Cassie held onto him. Her heart was pounding. "Let's go inside, call the police--"

Capa shook free of her. He was a handful of steps away when, as though in sudden agreement, he paused. He half-turned toward her. His expression was very odd. He looked, Cassie thought, as though he'd just recognized an irreparable flaw in a deeply important equation--

He sat down, hard, on the snowy ground.

"I, uh--" His hand went to his right leg, his inner thigh. He winced. "Cass," he said, very quietly, "get Mom."

Cassie came closer. Looked.

Blood was pumping, rhythmically, from a gash in Capa's thigh. Heavy pulsing spurts that kept time with his heart. He was sitting in a spreading pool of bright red--

"Oh, my God--"

Cassie took off her coat, spread it on the snow behind Capa. She knelt quickly, put a hand on his shoulder. "Angel, lie back--"

"Get Mom, Cass. I dropped--" Capa looked about unsteadily, then lay back, on her coat. His blood poured out and steamed on the snow. Melted it like sugar. "I dropped your phone, Cassie. Get Mom."

She was trying not to faint. She was trying not to vomit. She took his hand and pressed it palm-down, as hard as she could, into his right-side groin crease. He groaned with pain.

"Keep your hand there," she said. "Keep it there and press down hard. _Hard_, Robert. Do you understand?"

Capa looked at her numbly. She could see fear in his eyes. "Yes, Cass."

* * *

She re-entered Conklin Hall shivering and nearly mute with shock. But the blood on her hands brought her all the attention she could want.

* * *

"You did the right thing, honey," Marjory said. She was speaking to Cassie, quickly, from her son's side. Trey was opposite her, on Capa's left, leaning his weight into the clean white bar towel between his palms and the pressure point in Capa's groin. Blood was soaking the towel. "You got him flat; you put pressure on--" Her attention focused itself on the phone she held to her ear. They'd called for an ambulance; now Marge had a direct line to the response team--

"Jerry? Marge. We have a male, twenty-eight, approximately one hundred and fifty pounds. Four-centimeter gash to his right thigh, heavy bleeding from the femoral artery. We need smartblood, six units at least. WoundStat, too. Tell Marquette to have a vascular surgeon standing by."

She handed the phone to John when the connection terminated. His suit coat was draped around Cassie's shoulders. Her bloody fingers were bunched underneath, gripping the satin lining. She wasn't cold. She felt nothing, or nothing but distant. Capa was lying there in his blood, and he was a million miles away, ninety million miles away, he'd never made it back from the sun, he'd never come home, and she felt nothing, she'd never feel anything again--

"Four minutes," Marjory said. She took Capa's hand, held it tightly. She seemed afraid to look at his face. "They'll be here in four minutes, baby." She looked across at Trey. "Do you want me to take over, Edward?"

"No, I'm-- _Marge_--!"

Trey shouted when Cassie couldn't. Capa's eyes were rolling back in his head. Marge released his hand, tipped his head back, locked her mouth over his, and blew air into her son's lungs. Took a deep breath, blew again. Drew back and slapped him, hard, across the face. Cassie gasped--

So did Capa. Gasped, choked. Opened his eyes, shock-blue in his pale face, and looked up at his mother.

"Robert," Marge said, "you have to stay awake. _Stay awake_."

"Y--yes, Mom."

She leaned forward so that he couldn't see the tears in her eyes. She cradled his face in her rough, practical hands, pressed her lips to his forehead. "You can sleep later, honey. Later, baby. Later you can sleep all you want."

Next to Cassie, John Capa took a handkerchief from his pocket. He half-turned to his daughter-in-law and silently wiped away the tears streaming down her cheeks.

* * *

For all it seemed that time had slowed, precisely four minutes passed between the termination of Marge's call to Jerry Hulabowicz and his team. The SuperTrac they drove dwarfed the Behemoth, powerful, sure-footed, even potentially amphibious, designed, as Earth had begun her long solar winter, specifically for use in areas like this, the most snowbound regions of North America. Jerry in his black down EMT's jacket was big, broad-faced, a sandy-haired forty-something. He exuded easy, practical competence. He and Marjory greeted one another quickly and tersely, with the well-worn professionalism of longtime field partners. Better that way, he might have been thinking: better that Marge see simply as another stranger in need of help and not as her son the badly bleeding young man being lifted and loaded into the SuperTrac. Nevertheless, with a giant's gentleness, he offered Marge a hand as she climbed into the back of the SuperTrac after the stretcher carrying her boy. He offered Cassie a hand, too.

John stayed behind, with Trey and Elena, who'd come forward to join them from the crowd that had formed outside Conklin Hall. Cassie looked from a great and numb distance at the faces of the people standing where Capa had lain. Some of them were crying. His handler from earlier, the young man who'd come to the green room, was there, his face stricken.

In the moment before Jerry closed the doors, a dark-haired young woman, one of the event's bartenders, in a white button-down shirt, black button-down vest, and black trousers, came to the front of the crowd. She touched her fingers to her lips. Then she knelt and pressed her fingers to the bloody snow.

* * *

Paul was considering bed, and the prospect of a contentedly stoned Beth in that bed, when Mike returned. Mike was a little out of breath, and his eyes were a little too bright, and the Luna let Paul notice with interest but without really caring. On the three-dee, the reception at Conklin was winding down, maybe a bit too quickly, but Beth had said, watching the exodus for the main entrance--

-- and had that really been Mrs. Capa, spark-eyed Cassie, running in, her hands covered in blood--? The Luna wouldn't say, and far be it from Paul to question the Luna's wisdom--

-- Beth had said, as the reception-goers abandoned the hall, and their coats as well, it seemed-- she'd said, "Where's the fire--?", and she'd laughed, and Paul had laughed, too.

So now Paul was contemplating bed and Beth, and Mike was shaking snow-water from Paul's coat close enough for cold drops to splatter Paul's face, and as Mike hung the coat to dry on the hook inside the closet door he took from the pocket something small and square and black. For some reason-- perhaps the splash of water had focused his wits-- Paul cared just enough to ask:

"What have you got there, Mike...?"

Mike grinned and tossed Paul the black something. It fluttered open like bat's wings in the air, and the Luna still held enough dominion over his brain to make Paul miss the catch (and not to care that he did). Paul leaned away from Beth and picked the object up still open and looked.

Spark-eyed Cassie looked back at him. She was smiling, and she was holding a little boy with brown curly hair and very blue eyes, and he was smiling at Paul, too. Paul touched the picture; the image changed. Just the boy in the next shot, and twice again after that. In the last image, Cassie was back. She was asleep, and the little boy was, too, and they were facing one another, their noses nearly touching, on a shared pillow.

Something twisted in Paul's gut. There was an I.D. card or operator's license of some sort on the wing facing the pictures in the touch-album. The Luna told him to place his thumb over the man's photo there, told him not to read the name to the photo's right. Paul folded the wallet closed, swallowing, and set it back on the floor where it had fallen when Mike had tossed it his way.

Mike looked at Paul and Beth with his grin and his maybe-too-bright eyes. He nodded toward Robert Capa's wallet.

"Trophy," he said.


	6. Chapter 6

"Rosa," Marjory said, "it's Robert--"

Cassie watched her. She, Marjory, John, Trey, and Elena were in a sage-green waiting room outside the operating theaters of Marquette General Hospital. Cassie sat numbly next to Elena and Trey on a brown cloth-covered sofa. Her sternum was shaking, as though her heart were trying to knock its way out of her chest.

"Robert's a tough little bastard," Elena said quietly. She squeezed Cassie's hand. "You know that, don't you?"

"Yes." Cassie turned to her, tried to smile. "I know." She looked back toward Marjory and John and the viewscreen in the call center. Trey, realizing he had a call of his own to make, got up, politely excused himself to Cassie and Elena, and stepped out into the hallway.

The room was set for nightside lighting. The overheads were off; round-based end-table lamps provided illumination at levels meant to promote either calm or sleep. From boxes placed for the sake of polite convenience, tissues opened white wings to the dim light. They had the room to themselves. John, upon entering, had reached up and switched off the flatpanel vid unit hanging on the wall near the door: a need for quiet, a contempt for the hyper scroll of the news, a desire to avoid, perhaps, just for now, what that news would show regarding his son. He seated himself now next to Marjory at the vid-call terminal across the waiting room from Cassie's brown-cloth sofa, and forty-five seconds later Rosa Fischer was in view on the screen, and Marjory was justifying the fear that Rosa had betrayed when she saw her parents' expressions.

In Rosa's thin face, in the space of those three words, Cassie saw everything. Felt everything. The icewater shock, the tremulous sudden choke of grief. She felt tears fill her eyes as they filled Capa's sister's kind brown eyes those thousands of miles away, where Rosa sat before a vidscreen in Sydney, Australia.

Rosa asked: "Is he alive?"

"Yes," Marge said. Beside her, John was very quiet. His face was pale and delicate in its control. "He was mugged outside the reception at Conklin Hall, at the U. He was stabbed."

"How--" For a moment, Rosa's face twisted; her jaw shook-- "Is he going to be okay, Mom--?"

Cassie pressed her hand over her own mouth to stifle a sob. Marjory glanced her way, then said gently and firmly to her daughter: "The blade perforated his femoral artery. He lost a great deal of blood. But Cassie and Trey-- Trey was at the opening, Rosie; he showed up with Elena Wagner-- he and Cassie helped keep Robert stable before the medics came, and he stayed conscious all the way here. That's important, Rosa; that was good. We're at Marquette General. Robert is in surgery now. The best vascular team in the region is working on him."

How much Rosa could look like her brother, Cassie realized, when her face went thoughtful, cool, ever-so-quietly grim: "Do they know who did it...?"

"The police are at the scene," Marge said. "They'll be sending someone here to talk to Cassie--"

"Was she with him--?" Fresh shock widened Rosa's eyes. "Mom, is she alright--?"

"She was with him, but they were a distance apart when it happened. It was dark, and she didn't get a clear look." Marjory's hand reached for her daughter's image. Her fingertips brushed the air above Rosa's left cheek, closed slowly around the nothing they felt, and lowered themselves to the table before the viewer. "She's shaken up, but she's okay. Do you want to talk to her, Rosie...?"

It wasn't out of coldness or lack of caring, Cassie knew, as she watched Rosa shake her head: _no_. Though she and her brother bore little physical resemblance to one another-- Rosa had her mother's coloring and her mother's mother's face, or so the story went-- they shared with regard to emotions a deep caution. Once given, though, their love and friendship was lasting and absolute, as was their regard for the feelings of those they loved. No doubt Rosa was thinking that Cassie had tears and worries enough of her own without her sister-in-law breaking down in front of her on a video screen.

"No, Mom. Give her my love, though, yeah--?" She was beginning to struggle, Rosa was. Tears shone in her hazel eyes. "Keep me posted, okay--?"

"Of course, honey."

"We love you, Rose," John said to his daughter.

"Love you, too, Dad. Mom."

Rosa gave them a brave smile. Then she leaned forward, her hand going to the edge of the image frame, and the screen went blank.

* * *

"No fuckin' respect for the dead," Loinnir Whitby told her pillow as she reached for the phone. It was her unit, not the house extension, and it was beeping on the nightstand next to her bed. "Whitby. Speak."

It was Trey. Calling from a town in Michigan some six thousand miles away. Whitby listened, and her first irritation at being woken at four a.m., rather than at the six a.m. she'd planned, debristled and died. What replaced it was a sick feeling, a sinking one. She listened to Trey so quietly that he asked: _Loinnir, are you still there?_

"I'm still here, Trey," Whitby said. The words felt like stones in her mouth.

Beside her, Mace was stirring. He was a light sleeper, if an efficient one, and his body was tuned to the moods of hers. He waited until she ended the call.

"Who was that?"

"Trey." Whitby numbly set the receiver back in its cradle on the nightstand. She turned to look at Mace. "Robert's been stabbed," she said. "Trey says it's bad. Serious-bad. He could be dying, Stephen."

"Was Cassie with him?"

"Yes. She's alright; she wasn't hurt. They were out for a breath of air at this new building he was opening, and a fellow walked up and stabbed him and ran off. Just that quick." She could see the relief in his face at knowing that Cassie had gone unharmed; she could see, too, how he was trying to hide that relief from her. Before she could feel an abyss opening between them, Whitby caught Mace roughly but gently by the back of the head, tipped her forehead to his, nuzzled him. To her infinite relief, he relaxed slightly, nuzzled her back. "Who owes you favors on the airfield? I've got Danny Eillien; he could have us in a StratosHopper in forty-five minutes."

"One of the new BRMCs?" Mace was already easing clear, getting up, getting dressed. "Christ, Loinnir, what'd you do to deserve that--?"

"I clocked those extra practice hours with him when he couldn't get his head around that Xeno maneuvers package three months back." Whitby pulled a sweater over her head, tugged her hair free of the collar. "What'd you think I did--?"

Mace shrugged frankly. "Blowjob," he said.

"Is that all it takes...?" Whitby again had the phone to her ear, was waiting for the beeps to conjure Danny Eillien from his bed. "Might be one of your talents, Stephen, and I'm sure Danny'd appreciate it from you more'n from me, but I prefer-- Danny? Whitby here. I need a plane."

* * *

Just after they had arrived at Marquette General, just after Capa had been taken into surgery, once the double doors to the hall leading to the operating rooms had swung slowly back together in the motorized whine of their shutting, parting the fallen sunmaker from his wife and his mother, Marjory had steered Cassie into a restroom, stood her before a basin, and gently washed her daughter-in-law's hands and hers. Tendrils of Capa's blood swirled in the warm water in the sink, slipped away down the drain. Cassie thought of his eyes not quite knowing her. She thought of it, and she looked in the mirror at the careful, calm tenderness in Marge's face, and she bit her lip. Marge dried their shaking hands with soft paper towels, and they went back out into the hallway and to the waiting room outside the surgery, where John and Trey and Elena would be joining them.

That had been an hour ago. A minute ago, John and Marjory had been speaking with Rosa. Three hours ago, more or less, Capa had smiled at Cassie as she tugged his tie straight. She could still feel his blood on her hands.

"Charlie--" she said, suddenly, to the clock on the wall.

Marge looked over, ushered Cassie to the call center as John relinquished his seat for her. Trey came back in a moment later.

* * *

"Cassie, I've been trying to reach you--"

"Mom--"

Elaine Cassidy's face was a portrait of sorrow and worry. "It's been on the news. Cass, they're saying he's-- that he's going to--"

"He's in the operating room now, Mom. They're still working on him." A solicitous gathering of very quiet sobs seemed to crowd in behind Cassie's vocal cords. She spoke around them carefully. "He was still conscious when they brought him in. Marge says that's good. That's a good sign."

What she didn't say was how near he'd been to not knowing her. The most terrible despair she'd ever known: when his grip on her hand began to loosen (almost imperceptibly, but she could _feel_ it) as they approached the steel-and-rubber-bumpered doors of the surgery area.

Since he'd come back from his mission to the sun, she'd never felt apart from him. She might fly to the moon; he might fly to London or Moscow or Sydney; they might fight; they might have their separate days, when their schedules or moods didn't mesh. But she'd always felt a connection between them--

-- and in the clean pale hall leading to the surgery, amid the bump of bodies, the medics and nurses, she'd felt him slipping away. A distance, uncrossable, opening between her and Capa--

"See you soon, sweetie," she said, quickly, keeping her eyes on his. "I love you."

Capa smiled up at her, wearily, and she knew: he didn't quite recognize her. His face for a second was troubled, and Cassie's heart caught in her throat--

_No_--

-- and then the doors were opening, and his gurney was swept through them, and he was gone.

Now Elaine looked at her for a long, silent moment. "Margie should know." She smiled for her daughter, bravely and sensibly, then asked: "Do you want me there, Cass? I can be on the next flight--"

"No. No, Mom, it's okay. The weather's awful. John says they'll be closing the airport. Stay where you are." She hesitated-- "Does Charlie know?"

"No. He had a big day today. Sea World, Cass-- remember? He was practically asleep when Jen brought him home." Elaine's face brightened slightly. "He wanted me to be sure to tell you, though: he held a 'squisher' today. Whatever that is."

Cassie heard herself chuckle. "A sea cucumber, Mom. You know. They keep them in the petting pools."

"Ahh-- right."

"He and his daddy are a little more keen about playing with two-pound blobs of cold phlegm than Momma is."

"I see." Elaine studied her daughter's face, seemed to find what she saw acceptable-- "You'll keep me updated, Cassandra, right?"

Cassie nodded.

"He'll be in my prayers," her mother added. "You both will. Even if Robert might not appreciate it."

"He'd appreciate it. Of course he would, Mom."

Mother Cassidy smiled gently. "Get some rest, Cassandra." The same subconscious gesture Marjory had made when she spoke to Rosa: Elaine reached out now to touch her daughter's image, and Cassie saw the barest flicker of sadness in her mother's face as Elaine, quietly catching herself, lowered her hand again. "Call me when you know more."

"I will, Mom. I love you. Good night."

"I love you, too, Cassie. Good bye."

Cassie kept her eyes on her mother as Elaine leaned forward to terminate the call. Then she sat for a moment longer looking at the ghosts of images on the blank screen.

* * *

The byproducts of waiting: tension, frustration, a settling silence. Marjory stepped out to the center desk in the emergency reception area and spoke with the head nurse on duty. They knew one another. "Nothing yet, Marge: I'm sorry," Cassie heard, and after that, as Anne, the nurse, and Marjory lowered their voices, less in the way of words and more in the way of elemental tones and sympathy. Marge came back into the waiting room a minute later; she spoke quietly with John, who got up and politely invited Elena to join him in a raid on the cafeteria, which was open for the hospital's night-shift workers. Cassie was sitting with Trey, who had turned on the television. A moment's look at the news-- TRAGEDY IN MICHIGAN, the bottom scroll cried, while the visuals switched between the scene outside Conklin to people gathering outside the doors of Marquette General to, finally, footage of Capa speaking earlier that night. A stock photo of him, then, the face of Project Icarus, Robert Charles Capa, the man who had saved the world, handsome and delicate and earnest, his eyes clear and far-seeing and intense.

"Did he ever tell you, Cassie," Trey said, looking up at the screen, "how much he hates that fucking picture? Says it makes him look like a fruit. Told him I have to admit I agree."

Despite herself, Cassie laughed. "Yes, he's told me."

Trey smiled, then changed the channel. They were in neutral territory, not quite watching a program on armadillos on a nature channel, when John and Elena returned. John carried a tray. Soup in lidded paper bowls, creamy tomato or chicken noodle; chunks of bread wrapped in wax paper; water and cartons of milk. None of them wanted to admit how hungry they were, but they'd all gone without dinner, and all of them but Cassie were nursing alcohol on tension and otherwise empty stomachs.

John saw Cassie not reaching for a cup of soup. "Eat something, my dear," he said, looking at her with Capa's tenderness in his too-blue eyes. "Then get some sleep."

To that end, Elena placed a folded blanket next to Cassie on the sofa. She'd brought a pair of soft knit booties, too, with rubberized traction skids on the soles.

"Your feet must be killing you," she said, with her filter-free frankness, as she set the booties on the folded blanket. "I know mine are."

* * *

They ate, and again grew quiet. Cassie took John's advice and Elena's blanket. She rinsed her teeth with a last swallow of water and curled herself on the sofa and closed her eyes. She'd never sleep, she knew, but she owed it to the concern of those around her to make a show of trying. And she wanted to close her eyes, just for a moment, to the waiting, the awful stillness of it. Just for a moment.

She woke. She opened her eyes. The television was still on, but the others had gone. John and Marjory, Elena and Trey: they weren't in the room.

But she wasn't alone. Her head was resting against something. Warm cloth, over flesh. A thigh. She looked up--

Capa was looking down at her. He was sitting next to her on the sofa. He was still wearing his dress shirt, his tie, his dark suit jacket. There wasn't a drop of blood on him. He smiled; his fingers gently brushed Cassie's cheek.

"It doesn't hurt any more, baby," he said tenderly.

* * *

"Robert--"

Cassie sat up. Sat up too quickly: in panic and shock she swayed for a moment while the room blurred before her eyes. She was alone on the sofa. Trey sat across from her, badly folded into one of the room's practical, squared stuffed chairs and snoring from behind twitching eyelids. According to the clock, an hour and a half had passed since Cassie closed her eyes.

She focused, stood. Her heart pounded with unreality and dread. She padded to the doorway in the skid-soled booties Elena had brought for her and looked out, toward the nurses' station.

John and Marge and Elena were there, talking to two men in dark coats. One of them was tall, dark-haired, moderately heavyset. The other was about Capa's height and build, with reddish-brown hair and a homely, expressive face. He turned her way as the others did, as Cassie approached.

"Mrs. Capa--?" he asked, politely.

Cassie for a moment ignored him. She looked at Marjory: "Is there any word--?"

"They've got the artery sealed. Dr. Smith was here, honey; you just missed him. Now they're working on the damage to the surrounding blood vessels." Marge took Cassie's hand, squeezed it. "Circulation to the leg looks good, and they don't think he suffered a stroke at any point. There's still plenty to be done, but he's strong, Cassie. He's doing alright."

For the second time since Capa had been stabbed, the first having come the moment she saw the steam rising from his blood as it spilled out onto the snow, Cassie thought she might pass out. John saw with a gentleman's instinct her sudden unsteadiness and put his arm around Cassie's waist. The smaller of the two dark-coated men watched her closely, his face neutral.

"Perhaps we should come back later--" he said, uncritically.

"No," Cassie said. She felt suspicion in the taller man's gaze; she looked from him to the smaller man and said: "You're the police, aren't you?"

"Yes, ma'am. Detective Joshua Wilhelm." He offered Cassie his hand, nodded toward his partner. "Detective Craig Mann. May we have a word with you, Mrs. Capa?"

"Of course." Cassie gently eased clear of John. A consulting room near the nurses' station was open; Wilhelm ushered her inside. Detective Mann followed, closed the door.

The room held a small desk, three chairs. Wilhelm politely gestured; Cassie just as politely shook her head, remained standing.

"I need to ask--" Detective Wilhelm said, then, his voice apologetic-- "-- Mrs. Capa, did you stab your husband?"

There was shock, but it wasn't staggering. Cassie replied, with an officer's calm: "No, Detective, I did not."

Wilhelm didn't quite smile, but his face relaxed. His eyes were oak-brown, twinkling, honest. He sat at the desk and gestured again, at the two remaining chairs. Cassie now sat down. Detective Mann remained standing, but he moved himself so as not to tower over her. He moved, too, she noted, where he could watch her face more easily, though his expression bore nothing in the way of open skepticism. He seemed to trust his partner's initial assessment of the woman in their midst. He leaned slightly against the wall as Wilhelm continued:

"I ask only because as of now we have no one in custody and no witnesses other than yourself, and the snow is making analysis of the crime scene difficult. The trampling, too: footprints everywhere, and more than one set with blood on them. You do understand."

"Yes."

"Could you tell us what happened?"

Cassie told; they listened. She'd taken advantage of Capa, she said; at the bemused furrowing of Detective Wilhelm's homely forehead, she explained how she'd played her pregnancy against Capa's old-fashioned manners, there in the pelting snow, and made him flee: a one-sided snowball fight, with her winning and her husband running. And then the man in the long coat had approached Capa on the sidewalk, forty feet away, maybe fifty, from where Cassie was standing--

"Did you recognize him, Mrs. Capa?"

"No. It was dark; they were too far away--" She paused, remembering the jerk of the stranger's shoulders as he heard her cry Capa's name, how he raised his head and looked at her, faceless, from the shadows beyond the streetlamps. Something, though: something in how he moved-- "I couldn't see his face," she said, frowning.

She told them what she could, though: the stranger was male, and tall; his coat, though, was long, and it hid his build. He was a tenor, and his voice was that of a young man. No discernible accent. He hit Capa only once, hard. He was in shape: he was a fast runner. And he knew how to run on snow.

"He headed back toward the campus," Detective Mann said. "Either he had a car parked, or--"

"The residence halls," Wilhelm finished. "He could be a student. One shot, and he knew where to place it." He looked at Cassie. "You say your husband didn't realize immediately that he was hurt?"

"No. He--" She had to stop for a moment. It was happening that way for her: one moment she would be a professional among professionals, a pilot speaking to two police officers, and then the front would fall away and the nerves behind would find themselves exposed and her eyes would fill with tears. Detective Wilhelm seemed to understand. There was a box of tissues on the desk; he nudged it her way. Cassie took one, wiped her eyes. "He thought he'd been punched; he realized his wallet was gone; he went to run after him. He took maybe half a dozen steps. He was angry, but he seemed fine. And then he--"

"Didn't even realize he was stabbed," Wilhelm said softly. "Very fine-bladed weapon, I'm thinking. His attacker knew what he was doing."

"No surprise there," Mann said. "Half the kids around here grow up with a skinning knife in one hand and a filleting knife in the other."

"But that's it, Craig: don't you see? Local, young, possibly a student at the U. Somewhere to start."

They left her shortly after that, bound again for the scene outside Conklin. No word as yet on whether anyone had found Cassie's phone, let alone whether it had recorded anything of importance regarding the attack. Both men looked tired as they thanked her for her time and left her with their contact cards; Cassie herself was feeling exhausted. It was nearly one a.m.

* * *

She detoured to the washrooms before she returned to the waiting room. When she was nearly back, a woman's voice behind her called: "Mrs. Capa--?"

Cassie turned, thinking that, possibly, Wilhelm or Mann had sent a message after her. If the news involved Capa, she felt certain, Marjory or John would be the one to bring it. "Yes?"

The woman was a young mid-fortyish, short and a bit stocky and carefully groomed. She wore khaki slacks and a white doctor's coat over a pale blue button-down shirt. Cassie couldn't quite read the name on the tag pinned to the left of the woman's left-side lapel.

"I'm Susan Mackenzie. I'm with the associated medical resources department here at Marquette." She shook Cassie's hand while Cassie's tired brain was still processing her initial words. "May I speak to you?"

"Sure--"

Back into the consulting room she went, this time with Susan Mackenzie behind her. Cassie watched as the woman took from a portfolio papers, a datapad, and a stylus and laid them on the desk.

"I know this is a very stressful time for you, Mrs. Capa--"

"What is this about--?" Cassie asked, suddenly feeling uncomfortable.

"Your husband isn't registered as a donor."

For a second the air around her went black. She couldn't breathe. Cassie gripped the edge of the desk while her world fell away. _It wouldn't happen like this,_ she thought. _Marge would be here. Marge would be the one to tell me if_--

"Robert isn't dead," she heard herself say, as if the words would make it so. "My husband isn't dead," she said, more clearly, directly to Miss Mackenzie.

"Of course he isn't, Mrs. Capa. The surgery team has expressed confidence in his complete recovery." There was something sickening about Susan Mackenzie, something artificially soothing and smooth and absolutely fake. Something avaricious in the set of her pale green eyes. "I am required, however, under hospital policy-- under present law, in fact-- to remind you of the current pressing need in our country for donated tissue and organs. Our records show that Dr. Capa is not registered as a donor."

"No, he isn't." Cassie straightened away from the table. "He thought it seemed redundant."

Susan Mackenzie blinked. "Pardon me?"

"Redundant. My husband is a scientist; he doesn't approve of unnecessarily replicated effort." Cassie spoke coldly. She felt as though her heart had stopped beating. "He's already saved your life, and my life, and the life of everyone else on this planet. _What more do you want from him--?"_

The answer, of course, was obvious: his liver, his kidneys and lungs and heart, his corneas and marrow. Cassie walked out of the consulting room before she found herself throwing up or crying or hitting Susan Mackenzie; she went past the nurses' station and the waiting room, too, blindly and breathlessly and not realizing; she went down a hall she wouldn't have recognized, had she been thinking enough to know, and she pushed her way through a set of double doors--

And the flashes went off.

* * *

Between the flight and the drive from the airport in Sault Ste. Marie, both a fool's take on "headlong," given the damnable weather, Whitby was riding enough adrenaline to know how the lightning felt, or to feel how it felt to be the god who chucked the white-hot bolts, and still it came as a shock, after she and Mace had flashed their Project Icarus idents at the parting sea of security, to sweep into the lobby of Marquette General Hospital, trailing slush and snow and traces of the ruckus outside, and find Cassandra Cassidy there, surrounded by a jackal-pack of reporters. She was an intelligent, competent woman, Cassie was, and a good pilot, but now, amid the bristling of cameras and microphones and mini-recorders, she looked absolutely lost. Whitby waded in with Mace at her side, and both he and she elbowed and shoved with open impunity and effective rudeness until they and Cassie were face-to-face. Amazement lit the tears in Cassie's dark eyes when she saw them. Whitby caught her gently but firmly by the shoulders and steered her toward the hospital interior. Mace got himself between them and the reporters, and Whitby, moving quickly with Cassie now beside her, smirked as she heard him speak--

"Hey, guys, how's it going? Slow day in the news, huh? Man, that looks like an expensive camera-- _oops_. Shit. Oh, man. Got a fake eye, and my depth perception's all fucked up..."

Then they were away down a corridor quieter and dimmer, where the men and women were wearing nurse's garb or doctor's coats, and Whitby slowed and then stopped and turned, and Cassie as much as fell into her arms. The girl wasn't crying, but she was obviously badly shaken, and Whitby just held her and rocked her gently and let her settle.

"How are you, Cass?"

"Fine," and it was only half a lie, by the sound of it. Two thirds, maybe. Her grip on Whitby didn't loosen, though. Mrs. Capa had had enough for the day and then some, by the feel of her.

"How's Robert?"

"He's still in surgery." Cassie relaxed slightly. "They've got the artery repaired; now they're working on the blood vessels--" She stopped; she drew back and looked at Whitby, frowning, incredulous. "What are you doing here, Loinnir...?"

"Blame Trey. He called; we came."

"But the airport is closed. How--"

"Flew in on wings and a bet," said Mace, smiling as he walked up. He'd shaken off the baying pack. Whitby passed him Cassie, and he hugged the younger woman close.

"He bet me we wouldn't get here in one piece," Whitby said. "I bet him we would."

"I think you have it backwards, baby," Mace countered.

"And I think you owe me."

"A kick in the backside, maybe. Who taught you to fly, anyway--?" He grinned, still as high as Whitby was on adrenaline, and squeezed Cassie. He gave her a moment longer. He gave himself a moment longer, too, to hold her and calm the flyboy high from his expression and voice. Then he loosed her a bit in his arms and asked her, gently, to her face: "How is he, Cass? How are you?"

"He's--"

"Cassie, there you--" Marjory Capa, rounding the corner, stopped in mid-phrase and in mid-interruption as well. Stopped dead and stared at Mace and Whitby as though they were ghosts or green-skinned aliens.

"Hello, Marge," said Whitby-- and found herself engulfed a second later in another hug.

"Thank God you're here," she heard Marjory whisper.

* * *

From a fog of intoxication and sex, the Luna allowed Paul one moment of common sense: _Take your Slammer_. He left Beth dozing in her share of a post-orgasmic haze and padded out to the kitchen, where he ran from the tap a glassful of water and found in the cupboard to the left of the stove the pills that would keep his hangover from killing him in the morning. He took two of the red tablets and drank the water and felt himself swaying with the sloshing of the liquid as it descended to his belly, and then he took two more pills from the bottle, these two for Beth, and re-filled the glass. As he leaned to turn off the tap, his hand swung low and brushed on the countertop the foil packet that had contained the Luna.

It still did. Paul from his stoned distance frowned down at the two tiny blue squares the packet contained. He'd taken his hits. He'd laughed, watching Beth take hers. Then--

"Paul, is that you?"

Mike's voice, coming from the common area. Calling quietly over a hum of background voices. Pills and glass in hand, Paul padded to the kitchen doorway and looked out. Mike was sprawled like a boneless cat on the sofa. The news was playing on the three-dee, the same picture on all three screens. Snow. People in jackets, huddled in groups. Cars passing, snowflakes flashing in headlights. A multi-story building, its windows casting their glow into the snow-filled air--

-- _Hospital, where, despite the weather, well-wishers are gathering to await word on the condition of the man known to the world as "The Sun-Maker," Robert Capa, who is in surgery following_--

Paul stared. He tried to focus harder on the words and images, but the Luna was still in his head, and it was telling him-- or maybe he was telling himself-- _No no no no_--

Then _she_ was on the screens. Cassie. Caught at the center of a thorny thicket of cameras and microphones, her face frightened and lost--

-- _His wife, Cassandra, refused to comment on his condition. When asked if Professor Capa was going to_--

A woman and a man, she longboned and coldly beautiful and ash-blonde, he tall and handsome and broad through the chest and shoulders, both of them in dark blue jackets bearing insignias Paul's Luna-soaked brain had no chance of identifying, waded in to the pack of reporters openly swinging elbows and fists. They made their way to Cassie. The woman got her clear of the crowd while the man turned to Paul on the screen and grinned below cold eyes while his hand reached out and the image up-ended--

-- _-by and Stephen Mace, crewmates of Robert Capa on the successful second mission of Project Icarus, also refused to offer any insight into_--

Paul dropped the glass. It didn't shatter; it was made of plastic. Glass glasses were too great a risk in the House of Beth and Mike. Paul flinched as water splattered his bare feet and ankles.

"Aw, look what you've done," Mike said. He was still looking at the three-dee when he said it. He rolled himself up off of the couch and smiled forgivingly at Paul. He went past him into the kitchen and tore himself a bundle of paper towels from the roll. Then he knelt good-naturedly at Paul's feet, sopped up the spilled water, picked up the glass.

Paul stood where he was, looking out into the living area. Only now he was looking at a spot in front of the three-dee. The Luna dropped into his mind a thought of bat's wings. Photos.

An image on the three-dee: A man's face, young and handsome. Pale blue eyes, wide-set, intense--

-- _Robert Capa, the genius behind the second mission of Project Icarus, who on Friday night was brutally attacked outside_--

"Where's the wallet, Mike?"

"The-- oh." Mike scooped up the sopping paper towels, squeezed them out in the sink, dropped the compressed white mass into the cycler bin. "I put it back in your coat pocket."

"Why--" The Luna broke Paul's chain of thought before the word could become a question. Again he frowned. "How many hits of Luna did you buy, Mike?"

"Six. Why?"

"There's--" Paul realized he couldn't remember. Or he couldn't count. "They're not all--"

Mike ran another glass of water and put the glass in Paul's hand. "We'll discuss it in the morning, okay? You get Beth her Slammer." He grinned at Paul. "Aren't you the chivalrous one--? Always thinking of our girl."

He turned Paul back toward the bedrooms, sent him off with a gentle push. Paul went back to bed.

* * *

Marjory's thanks hadn't arisen from tragedy, or from a tragedy greater than the one at hand when Whitby and Mace had left Scotland. Capa was still in surgery-- he would remain thus for just over another hour-- but he was nearer to life than he'd been when he was brought in. His mother's gratitude, Whitby realized, as she and Mace sat with cups of coffee and rolls purloined from the hospital's commissary among those in the pale-walled waiting room, was purely talismanic. Very simply, pragmatic and tough though Marjory Capa might be, she had a mother's heart beating in her chest: Loinnir Whitby had brought her son back to her once, and Whitby's presence in the here and now meant that her son would come back to her again. Whitby didn't mind the responsibility of it, or the potential tragedy or disappointment in it. Let Marge believe in something if she wanted to, after what had to have been a most shocking and horrible day.

John Capa she was worried about. Mace was sticking with Cassie, and Whitby felt a chill within herself, a quiet tracing of despair, at the attention he was showing the girl he might have lost to Capa, but she could shrug that away for less-petty concerns, less-selfish, later worryings. No: John was the one to watch. She saw him losing himself in himself as she'd known Capa to do, shutting himself down outwardly until he'd as much as turned himself off to the world. So she stuck with him, kept him talking quietly to her and Marjory, until the doctor came, the fella who'd done most of the night's work on John and Marge's boy, fresh out of his bloody scrubs, his arms and hands still raw from scouring, and told them that Capa was out of surgery and alive and still unconscious, all three. They were moving him to a recovery room off the emergency area.

Marjory and John spoke their thanks to the man, as did Cassie, a grateful smile lifting the weariness and worry on her sweet face.

* * *

Only after Dr. Smith had left the room did John react. As people rose stiffly from too-long-sat-in seats, as Trey and Elena Wagner announced, with tired reluctance, that they were returning to their hotel but that they'd be back on hand in the morning, he stayed where he was. Mace stood as Cassie did, then turned to Whitby with a gentle smile. She took the hand he offered and got up, smiling back at him. Then she looked again at John.

Marjory had her forehead tipped to his; she was rubbing his shoulders. "It's alright now, sweetheart," she was murmuring. "Robbie's going to be okay. He's going to be fine."

John looked at his wife with their son's clear blue eyes. He looked at her for a long, lost moment. He tried to smile. Then he buried his face in his hands and started to sob.

* * *

He was deeply unconscious, and he looked too small on the bed. Too thin and delicate and exposed. They'd slipped his wiry arms through the short loose sleeves of a hospital gown, but they hadn't covered him with a blanket. They had to be able to see the wound in his thigh, dressed though it was: his legs were bare, and he looked pale and cold.

But his skin was warm. He was alive. Cassie was leaning over Capa with her cheek resting on his forehead. Her turn, after she'd deferred her rights as wife to those of Marjory and John, to be the first to be near their still-living son. He was breathing on his own, thank God, but to Cassie's ears it sounded shallow and somehow disjointed and nothing like the breathing of his sleep.

She had just a minute, for now, and then his caregivers wanted her away. He needed his rest. She needed hers, too. She would have given her soul to curl herself next to him on the bed.

"I'll be back soon," she whispered to him. "Wait for me."

She straightened. As she did, a tear slipped from her cheek and landed on Capa's forehead. Cassie bent again, kissed away the tiny splash. She let her lips linger on his skin. Then she went to join Marjory and John, Whitby and Mace. It was two thirty in the morning. They had a snowy drive ahead of them, and she was nearly asleep on her feet.

* * *

"They'll tear this place apart," Mike said. "The whole campus."

The Saturday ten a.m. news was much the same as the Saturday one a.m. news had been. Beth, in a rare display of domesticity, had made the day's first pot of coffee. She was quietly nursing a cream-and-sugar mugfull from her vantage point in the kitchen, holding the old chipped cup close to her sweatered chest, as she and Paul and Mike watched the chaos on the three-dee. Paul held his own mug in a shaking hand, not caring that the ceramic was hot enough to burn his fingers.

_How had it come to this?_

It had started, he knew, not with Mike laying the packet of Luna on the kitchen counter or borrowing his coat the night before. Nor with Robert Capa's wallet falling open on the floor next to him as he and Beth watched in drugged and stupored surprise. No: Paul first knew how doomed he was when in the pale haze of morning he looked in the harsh light of the bulb above the bathroom sink and saw the blood splattered on his face.

Robert Capa's blood.

From Mike shaking out Paul's wet coat. Not just snow-water on the cloth. The rest of Capa's blood was in the closet now. It had dripped down in the night. Blackish splatters on the worn wood-slats of the closet floor.

Now Capa was still alive but comatose following night-long surgery to repair the damage caused by a stabbing wound to his right leg. According to the news, either rumor or a police tip indicated that his attacker was a student at NMU. And now they were descending on the campus: the news media, law enforcement, and, in defiance of the weather, a blizzard that just wouldn't quit, Capa's most loyal fanatics (who, granted, were legion: he had, after all, saved _the entire fucking world_). One of them was on-screen, a broad-faced fifty-something man in a gray snow-flecked stocking cap, who looked in the camera with fierce blue eyes and said--

_Kill the bastard. Catch him and kill him_--

"What have you done, Mike?" Paul asked.

"What have _I_ done...?" Mike got up from the couch with a bowl in his hand. He went into the kitchen. Paul heard the rattle and splatter of cereal hitting milk. "I think it's what _you've_ done that should concern us, Pauly-boy."

Paul's stomach went hollow. He looked to Beth, but she was keeping her eyes on the three-dee and she wouldn't look back at him.

"What do you mean, Mike?" he asked. His throat closed around the words, gave them hardly any air.

"Think about it, Paul." Mike came to stand beside him. He spooned Cheerios into his mouth and chewed slowly. "Beth here was obsessed with Robert Capa. Is still obsessed, judging by the way she's watching the--"

Beth turned, looked at Mike with dead, horrified eyes. He smiled at her--

"Hey, Beth," said Mike. "Good morning." He turned his smile to Paul. "Anyway, she's obsessed with handsome, brilliant, unobtainable Robert Capa. She won't let up. She's even written a paper on him. He comes to the campus, he blows her off right in one of her own classes, in front of three dozen people, and she still won't drop it. So last night her boyfriend gets drunk and high and goes to Conklin Hall and stabs Robert Capa. That's you, Paul," he added, by way of explanation, when Paul stared at him blankly. "The drunken, high, jealous boyfriend."

"But I didn't-- I didn't do--"

"You wrote most of that paper, Mike--" Beth set down her mug before her shaking hand dropped it.

"That paper, and most or all of the four that came before," Mike said, smoothly. "Do you really want that getting out? How's your scholarship situation these days, Beth...?"

"Oh, my God--"

She came close, gripped Paul's arm. He felt her tremble against him. She was afraid. It gave him sudden, angry focus; he said to Mike: "That's it. You're insane, Mike. I'm calling the police--"

He reached for the callset on the wall to the right of the kitchen door. Mike caught his wrist.

"Not yet, Paul," he said quietly. "Hear me out."

"What--"

"It's a simple question of math." Mike's eyes were clear and calm. Infinitely reasonable. "If you turn me in, I'll take you down with me. You and Beth. We were all in on it together. What's more, you were high on an illegal substance. I wasn't. I had a bit too much wine, I had a headache, I went to bed early. Do you see where this is going, Paul...?"

"Beth and I both saw you leave."

"Or I didn't see _you_ leave, and neither did Beth. She was passed out or high as a kite. Didn't see a thing." Mike laid his hand companionably on Paul's shoulder, moved closer. "Simple math, Paul. Turn me in, and we all suffer. Turn yourself in, and it's just you. The longer this goes on, the worse it'll become. Turn yourself in now, before the mobs turn really ugly, and the police can protect you. You save me, and, more importantly, you save Beth. Think about it."

Paul hesitated. Beth pressed closer to him, and he swore he could feel her heart pounding in time with his. He stood and stared at the infinite reason in Mike's cold eyes, and then he reached again for the callset.

This time, Mike didn't stop him.

* * *

Cassie sat next to Capa where he lay unconscious and betubed and monitored and read to him from Twain, the same Twain she'd left on the lamp table in John's library the day before (or ten days, or maybe a hundred ago. The time seemed all wrong: surely more than a day had passed between then and now.). She was rested and clean; she wore more comfortable clothing; she'd eaten. She'd spoken again to her mother, and to Charlie, too, who for now seemed content with the explanation that Daddy had hurt his leg and was taking a nap while it got better. She wasn't happy, but she was no longer immobilized by tragedy.

She'd spent the first part of this first day's visit touching him, nuzzling his face, caressing his hands. His doctors didn't know how long his coma would last, and it was important that he remain aware, however far away he might be, that the physical world was still waiting for him. Her voice was part of that world, too, so she talked to him as well. Told him about the call to Charlie, about Mace and Whitby coming to her rescue, about the still-damnable weather (the blizzard had officially become "ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous, even by March standards," according to his mother, who'd regained a bit of her pluck and vinegar after a few hours' sleep, a shower, and breakfast).

Now she was reading Twain to him. He liked the rough, elegant bounce of the words, and she did, too; they both liked the man's sense of humor. She was chuckling for him over Twain's frustrated suggestion regarding the weapons to be used in a French duel-- "... _brickbats at three quarters of a mile_..."-- when Marjory's friend from the night before, Nurse Anne, came to the entrance of the alcove where Capa's bed was housed.

"Cassie--?" She'd been told, Anne had: no "Mrs. Capa" was necessary, definitely not for Marjory or, just as definitely, for Marge's daughter-in-law.

Cassie closed the book, looked over. "Yes?"

"We thought you should know," Anne said. She had a kind, plain face; she looked unbelieving now, relieved, a little stunned. "It was just on the news. They've got him. The boy who stabbed your husband. He turned himself in."


	7. Chapter 7

"I tried to kill Robert Capa once," Loinnir Whitby said.

Nothing but a table separated Paul from the woman and man seated across from him. No barrier. No screen, no Plexiglas. Were he to attack them, the AutoTaze with which he'd been implanted would send directly to his spine a jolt of electricity stiff enough to turn his nerves to jelly; were he to escape, the device would act as a homing beacon. They'd all three of them be scanned for contraband as they left the interrogation area. But for the sensors and microphones and cameras dotting the room, he and they were very much alone.

Stephen Mace shifted in his chair as Whitby spoke, his movement easy, relaxed; Paul saw the panther-glide of muscles beneath Mace's sweatshirt. He was watching Paul with predatory calm. He had an artificial eye, Paul knew, but it was impossible to tell which one it was.

"But I had an excuse," Whitby continued. "He tried to throttle me, and I hit him with a spanner. Would've stove his head in if this fella here--" -- a casual head-tip toward Mace-- "-- hadn't stopped me. We were both a bit insane at the time, me and Robert. Him a bit more. So what's your excuse, Paul?"

She was beautiful in a way that Cassie wasn't. Features as clean, but her face was longer and leaner. Not harsh, not old. Experienced. The face of a woman who'd been to hell and back, as literally as any woman on Earth could claim to have been. Her eyes reminded Paul of Superior in November, when patches of blue from the sky glinted in the lake's cold waves.

"I don't know."

"You don't know, or you don't want to talk about it?" Mace asked bluntly.

"It's the worst kind of cabin fever, living in a life pod." Whitby leaned closer, put her forearms on the table. "Y' can't step outside, see. Oh, you can, but you're wearin' your own life pod when y' do, and it's a hundred times smaller'n the one you left." She had an accent, Paul realized. Irish or Scottish. He'd never heard it in any of the interviews she'd given since the mission. Lilting and gentle. Soothing, even. Utterly unlike her expression, or like the North Sea eyes she had trained on him. "As for those with you-- you come to feel that you're all part of the same creature. Y' share each other's space and smell for so long that you come to feel you're all extensions of each other. Which is to say, Paul, the four of us-- Robert, Eddie Trey, Stephen here, myself-- we feel it very keenly when one of us is hurt. Why'd you do it, lad? What did Robert Capa ever do to you?"

"I was jealous. I got drunk, I did drugs, and--"

"-- and that is bullshit," Mace said. "That's what you told the cops. That's what's in the report."

"I don't have to speak to you--"

"And you know what?" Mace, too, leaned in close. "I could break your fucking neck right here, right now, and they wouldn't do a goddamn thing to me. I could do it and walk right out and snap my fucking fingers, and they'd cover it up. Haven't you heard, kid? Me and Loinnir, and Trey and Capa: we are fucking _gods_ on this planet."

"Mace," said Whitby, very softly. She kept her eyes on Paul.

"You know the funny thing--?" Mace continued. "When we started out on the mission, I didn't even particularly like the little freak. But what Loinnir said's true. You live long enough with someone like that without killing him, or without him killing you, and you end up being part of his life, like he's part of yours. Robert Capa's a better man than you'll ever be, and he didn't deserve what you did to him."

Paul had no choice but to let him talk; Whitby allowed Mace to speak uninterrupted and watched Paul as he did. She seemed to read something in Paul's face, though Paul tried hard not to react to anything he heard; she asked, her voice still lilting and quiet, when Mace had finished: "Who's your roomie, then, Paul?"

"What do you mean--?" Paul heard himself whisper.

"Oh, for--"

Mace's hand went up in a fist; Whitby gently but firmly caught it there in mid-air, midway to Paul's face, and drew it down to the tabletop. Not for the sake of the cameras, of course, or for those beyond the interrogation-room walls who were watching what those cameras showed. Mace had been right, Paul knew: he and Whitby were Robert Capa's friends and crewmates, the archangels who stood to the right and left of Earth's young sun-god, and were anything to happen to him, that is to say to Paul, to Robert Capa's would-be murderer, here in this dim taupe-walled room, were he to trip, for instance, and break his neck against the edge of the heavy table whose legs were bolted to the floor, the data files from the room's camera feeds would turn up erased and no one would otherwise bear witness. Detective Wilhelm had asked if Paul had wanted him or another officer present while Whitby and Mace spoke to him; Paul had declined. He had declined the presence of a lawyer, too.

His parents: he wondered if they knew. They must. It blared from the news nonstop. They lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, lifelong Midwesterners, and they would be sensible enough not to attempt the drive from there to here, into an Upper Peninsula late-spring blizzard. They hadn't called, either, not yet. Paul was glad. His mother would cry, and that would make Paul cry, too. His father would have nothing to offer his son but anger, shock, and disappointment. Which was exactly, Paul knew, what he deserved.

"Flatmate, Paul," Loinnir Whitby prompted quietly. "Y' have one, I assume. You know what it's like, sharin' space with someone in a place like this. Six months of winter, all that. Gets close, don't it?"

"Yeah."

"What's he like-- I'm assuming it's a fella-- What's he like, Paul?"

She really had no right to ask, Paul knew. But he found her voice comforting. He could hear in her tone how they'd survived, she and Mace and Capa and Trey, in the cramped lifepod configured from the flight deck of the _Icarus II_. Nearly sixteen months in just that space, two cold, dimly lit decks crowded with equipment and workstations, two of them, Mace and Trey, badly hurt, and all four of them dependent on the mercies of recyclers for their air, water, and food. Paul glanced at the scars on Mace's face. He remembered, too, hearing that Robert Capa had suffered some sort of psychotic break at the beginning of their voyage home, something to do vaguely, mystically even, with his presence too near the solar bomb just before it detonated. But he had recovered, or the mission's public relations team had in any case effectively downplayed the details of his mental illness, if it had in fact existed, and Robert Capa owed a good deal of his survival, recovery, and post-mission life on the world he had saved to the woman who sat across from Paul now.

"Mike," Paul said to her. "His name is Mike. He's majoring in language arts. Wants to be a writer."

"Ooh--" Whitby flinched wryly, smiled. She met Paul's eyes, and it was as though she and he were alone in the room, or in a room less unpleasant. "That's rough, innit--?"

Paul wasn't precisely sure what she meant, but he found himself nodding. "Yeah. Can be."

"Did that once, once upon a time. Tried for literature at uni, couldn't crack it. My brother got his degree. He's a writer, and a right nut he turned out t' be. Can turn your head all the way 'round with his moods and talk. Mike's that way, too, is he--?"

Paul looked to the tabletop. Whitby still had Mace by the wrist, but her hand was holding him now, not restraining him. "Yeah," he said. "He gets stuck on a paper or a project, or Beth does, and--"

"Who's Beth?" Mace asked.

"My girlfriend. She, uh--"

Whitby said to the silence that followed: "Gets confusing, doesn't it, Paul? There y'are with your math problems, and it's all so straightforward, all so clean and clear-cut, and then you drop rhetoric into it, those bloody English majors and their papers, and it gets all muddled. She doing language arts, too? Beth?"

"Yeah."

"She pretty, Paul?" Mace looked at him. Paul could feel the man's stony gaze on the crown of his head. "Must be, if you're willing to kill a guy for her."

Paul felt himself shrinking in at Mace's tone. Before he could reply, there was a rapping. The door opened, and Detective Wilhelm looked in.

"Cassandra Capa is here," he said. "She'd like a word with Paul. Alone."

* * *

When the word came that Capa's attacker had given himself up, John had offered to stay at the hospital. He no doubt could see in Cassie's face her righteous, angry curiosity: if one of them were to confront the creature who had hurt their Robert, it should be her.

Marjory wasn't with them at Marquette General. At least not yet. She was on ice-rescue: a group of fishermen had been stupid enough to venture out onto Superior's treacherous, snow-punked spring ice, and now two of the four were on a floe drifting away from shore and the sheltered shallow water of the bay off Marquette. Man three had made it back to Highway 41, which skirted the bay, to find help. Man four had drowned, and two members of the rescue team nearly had, too, trying to persuade Superior to give up her dead.

"Marjory likes to say that only Jesus Christ was qualified to walk on water," John had said, as he and Cassie drove to the hospital two hours earlier. "The rest of us risk our necks every damn time. As usual, she's right. People never learn."

Cassie had wondered once, shortly into her new relationship with Capa's family, why Marjory, who was respectably into the age range of early retirement, still chose to work so many hours in the field. To which Marjory had replied, frank and unoffended:

"Because I choose to remain in a place so full of dolts and morons." She smiled and aimed a nudge at John, who at the time had been helping wash raspberries for pie. "Like this one here."

Having finished his graduate studies, twenty-seven-year-old John Capa had been visiting friends in Marquette. Up from Chicago he was, and he knew about a hundred and fifty percent less about kayaking than he and his friends thought he did.

"Rolled about fifty yards off Middle Island, and couldn't right himself," Marjory said, as she rolled out pie crust. "By the time his friends fished him out, he'd drunk about half the lake, and he wasn't breathing. One of my first quick-response cases. We got the water sucked out of his lungs; we were getting brainwaves on the field-C.A.T. So I start with the CPR, and three or four breaths in, he gags about a quarter-cup of lakewater into my mouth and opens his eyes. And the rest, as they say, is history--"

"As I remember it, you called me an idiot," John said. "For starters."

"That wasn't until later. When I thought you had a chance in hell of understanding what I was saying."

"I came by the barracks to thank her," John said to Cassie. "She said she hoped it was on my way to the airport or the highway, because they had idiots enough in the region without tourists coming in to drown themselves, too."

"So he leaves," Marge continue. "And I said to Mary Johnson-- Mary was my field partner at the time; Jerry hadn't even joined up yet-- I said to her: 'Why'd a guy with eyes that beautiful have to be so stupid? You wouldn't want someone that dumb loose in the gene pool.'"

John chuckled. "As it turned out, I was loose in the gene pool less than two years later."

"'Dumb at first sight.'" Marge smiled. "Nearly put that on the wedding invitations."

* * *

Detective Mann drove Cassie to the central police station in Marquette. The world was white. Everything was soft and rounded and muffled. There were people outside the station, and they seemed muffled, too, and bundled up, though not as much against the cold as against the snow. The temperature was a comfortable-- for the denizens of the Upper Peninsula, anyway-- thirty degrees Fahrenheit. Even on Cassie's California skin it wasn't especially chilling. Nonetheless, snow could creep in and melt to icewater under a collar; cheeks turned raw from being too long outside in the damp. As she got out of the car, Cassie felt eyes on her, anger, hope. She heard her name and Capa's spoken, the words hushed and blunt as wood in the snowy air. "That's her; that's his wife." As if she were there to exact revenge.

* * *

"His name is Paul Brehmer, and he's likely to become federal property," Detective Wilhelm said, as he greeted Cassie inside the station. He took her coat, brushed the snow from it, folded it over his arm as he walked her back to the interrogation rooms. "Feds want to treat it like an attack on a foreign dignitary. We told them we'd just as soon keep it local. No use attracting more kooks than what we've already got. He's been quiet since we brought him in--"

"You feel sorry for him," Cassie said. She knew she'd feel differently if Capa were dead, but she was compassionate by nature, and she sensed Wilhelm was, too. The boy they had in custody might be a monster, but he was at least capable of feeling guilt, or he'd not have turned himself in.

"It's his affect." Wilhelm paused at a keypad to the right of a gray door, a small mesh-reinforced window at eye level in its dull metal surface. He tapped in a lock code; Cassie heard a heavy, flat click. Wilhelm opened the door, politely ushered her through. "Not flat: that'd peg him as a psychopath right there. He's not bragging, he's not making threats. Polite kid. If anything, I'd say he's scared. Can't say I blame him."

Cassie stepped into a taupe-walled hallway, dimly but adequately lit. Metal doors, like the one through which they'd just passed, to the right and left. "Has he said why he did it?"

"Says his girl was nuts for your husband. Obsessed. I'm sorry-- you know that people are, don't you--?"

Cassie nodded. She thought of the crowd outside the station, the snow-dusted dozen or so waiting for word on the boy who'd tried to kill their savior. Patient and quiet, shuffling their feet to ward off the shivers that came from standing so long in the chill. Waiting for news. For a sign. For a _signal_--

Cassie shivered.

She'd seen it in their faces, solemn and focused, as they watched her get out of the car. She had only to give the word--

_Kill him._

-- and Paul Brehmer would die. Or the people doing Cassie's bidding would die, or find themselves tazed and arrested in the process.

"Closest thing to God most of us will ever see," Wilhelm added softly, as he halted before the last door on the hall's left side.

Cassie frowned. "Did he say that, or are you saying it now?"

"What--?"

"The 'closest thing to God.'"

Wilhelm looked through the door's heavy meshed window before he keyed the unlock code. "He said it. Got it from his girl. She's a student, like he is, at the U. Language arts. She did this paper on your husband, and she said--"

"What's her name? Can I ask that?"

"Beth-- ah-- Beth Markham."

Wilhelm rapped at the door, turned the handle.

* * *

Paul remained seated as Mace and Whitby rose and left the room. He could hear them, then, in the hall, them and Detective Wilhelm, talking quietly with Robert Capa's wife.

Then she walked in and closed the door behind her. Paul rose. It felt-- ridiculously, he knew, and giddily-- as though he were being drawn up out of his chair by his heart. She was real; she was right there--

"Cassie--" he heard himself say.

She stepped around the table. She drew back her right hand and slapped him across the face. She knew how to hit. From his viewpoint of sudden, accepting shock Paul knew this. She kept her body loose throughout the swing, and her arm unfurled like a whip, and for all her delicacy-- and she _was_ delicate, this close up-- had she hit him with a closed fist, Paul knew, she might have knocked him down. As it was, he stood with his eyes averted and meekly touched his tongue to the blood seeping where his left top canine had nicked the inside of his mouth.

"I've already told Detective Wilhelm I'm prepared to be tried for battery," she said.

"I won't press charges," Paul replied.

"It's not for you to decide. Nothing is for you to decide. Not any more. I've struck an arrestee in police custody. I can be charged for that. I can lose my job and my commission." Cassie stepped away from him. "Sit down."

Paul seated himself. Cassie seated herself across from him, in the chair where Whitby had sat. She was even more beautiful than she'd been on the three-dee. She looked pale, though, too, and her dark eyes were still tired from crying.

"I'm sorry," Paul said.

"How old are you, Paul?"

"Twenty."

"Do you know how old Robert Capa was when he was asked to join Project Icarus?"

"Fifteen," Paul said, very quietly. He knew Capa's biography. Most people did, he figured. Like most of those people, he admired Capa; like those in Capa's field, as a young engineer Paul respected the man's work. _What the hell am I doing here--?_

"Then you must know that he was seventeen when he was told he was too young to join the crew of _Icarus I_."

"Yes, ma'am," Paul whispered.

"For the next seven years, he devoted himself to the Icarus Project. His life _was_ the Project. Am I boring you, Paul--?"

He tried not to flinch before her dark, accusing eyes. "No."

"When the second mission became necessary, he knew more about the science of saving the sun than anyone else on Earth. He was twenty-four when I last saw him, before he left. Nearly three years he was away."

She sat back in her chair. She folded her hands calmly on the tabletop between them and watched him. Her wedding ring, a simple, elegant band in white gold or platinum, glinted softly in the room's dim light. She waited until Paul met her eyes before she continued.

"He spent his life saving this planet, and he's never really had a chance to live on it." Sad wonder in her voice, in the frown that drew her dark brows together. "Why would you take that away from him?"

"I don't know." Paul could feel the tears welling up in his eyes. He looked away. "I'm sorry."

She said nothing. More than any retort, any take on "You're not sorry: you're pathetic," her silence stung him. That, and the sympathy in her eyes. She believed Paul had hurt the man she loved, and she hated him for it. But she pitied him, too. _Why--?_

A final, undeserved kindness: in the moment before Paul started to cry, Cassie looked toward one of the wall cameras and said, "We're finished here, Detective Wilhelm."

* * *

Detective Mann saw Paul's visitors out. Wilhelm entered the interrogation room as Cassie was leaving it; she saw him offer Paul a kindly smile along with a Kleenex, and she heard him say:

"Restroom, Paul? Then what do you say we get you something to eat, son--? You must be hungry."

He would definitely be the "good cop" to Detective Mann's "bad," if such things actually went on in real police work and not just in vids or books; what Cassie found striking, though, was the sincerity in Wilhelm's tone, even in those few words. The empathy of a professional whose work required him to be half-psychologist, certainly. Legal requirements, too, of course: depriving a suspect of sleep, food, or basic hygiene could nullify even the most blatant confessions.

But, no, this was something else. Cassie had felt it as she sat across from Paul and looked openly at his face. He couldn't or wouldn't meet her eyes, but he wasn't shrinking away from her gaze. He wasn't trying to hide; his tears were real. He was, Cassie thought, absolutely ordinary. Tallish, a bit gangly, black hair kept neat, hazel eyes. High forehead, regular features. Nothing sinister about him, not a thing. More than that-- and the thought struck her as a revelation-- nothing that would make anyone say, after the grisly fact, "He was always such a quiet boy." No: Paul, she realized, was _ordinary_. Had had his share of scrapes, made his share of dumb mistakes, was likely average or just above in his grades, a dependable if unexceptional member of his engineering team at school. Not a festering, resentful, long-simmering, ticking-time-bomb bone in his body.

She wondered if she knew what Detective Wilhelm would say to him, the opening words of the interrogation following Paul's bathroom break, his being given a sandwich, a Coke, a bag of Fritos from the snack machine--

_Who really did it, Paul--?_

"There's something I need to show you," Cassie said to Whitby, as Detective Mann led them back to the lobby of the station. She looked in her tote.

Her flashpad wasn't there. She'd left it on the lamp table that morning, when she'd picked up the Twain en route to the hospital.

"Can we-- I need to go back to the house."

"Sure--" Whitby looked to Mace--

"Why don't you two go?" Mace dug in his pocket, handed Whitby a set of keys. He smiled at Cassie. "I'll head back to the hospital, keep an eye on Brainiac for you."

She smiled back at him. "Thanks, Mace."

"Be careful on those roads." Mace leaned in, kissed the corner of Whitby's mouth. Cassie saw her glow at the contact, where once Whitby might have bristled at his tone, or at words her younger self could easily have found patronizing. Then Mace was off toward the duty desk and Detective Mann, and as Cassie left with Whitby, she heard him finagling either a ride back to the hospital or to a car rental.

* * *

"He's a clever fellow, that Detective Wilhelm," Whitby said, when she and Cassie were in the car Whitby and Mace had rented and were on the white road back to the Capa house. "Gives us closure by letting us confront the little bastard and gets half his interrogating done in the bargain. You don't think he did it either, do you, Cass? Paul?"

Cassie nipped absently at a knuckle while she looked out at the snow-covered world. Superior arched suddenly into view to the right of the highway, a flat expanse of white reaching to the north and west. The dark, nubbled rise of the near-shore islands. And, far to the west, a horizon line where clouds and fog seemed to mix: steam rising off the dark, deeper, open water, free of ice and slightly warmer than the air above. In the bay, Marge said, the ice still ranged from three to six inches thick, theoretically capable of supporting a human body or two, but-- as the fishermen that morning had found out-- rotten with cracks and brittle strata of snow.

"No, I don't."

* * *

They reached the house and entered, using a keycode Marjory had given Cassie that morning. Cassie's flashpad was where she had left it, on the same lamp table where she'd picked up the Twain earlier; she felt silly, now, for not having taken the pad at the same time. Subconsciously, though, she thought, she might have been loath to touch it.

"It's this paper," she said to Whitby, frowning as she powered on the pad and cued up Beth Markham's thesis on Capa. "A girl in one of John's classes wanted Robert to read it."

Whitby took the pad, read. Her eyebrows slowly peaked and valleyed their way through curiosity, amazement, frank contempt.

"This is terrible," she said, handing the pad back to Cassie. "Must admit, I've committed my share of crimes against the language, but--"

"Not worth killing someone over, is it?" Cassie said quietly.

"I'd stop short, myself." Whitby left the library, headed for the kitchen. "I could do with a cup of tea. You--?"

"Sure."

"Swift pop to the jaw, maybe," Whitby continued. She was at the sink, running water into the kettle from the tap. "And that being for whoever wrote--"

She stopped. She looked from the kettle to Cassie. "You don't think she wrote it, do you?"

"Neither do you, Loinnir. Why--?"

"I've not even met the girl," Whitby said slowly. She rummaged in the cupboards for tea and mugs. "I've not even met her, and looking at that-- It's like there's two voices in it, one pushing the other. Does that make sense to you, Cass--?"

Cassie nodded.

"Why didn't John pick up on it?" Whitby asked.

"Maybe because he has to see six dozen of these things. We have just the one."

"Have the police seen it?"

"Detective Wilhelm said that Paul mentioned it, but I'm not sure if he's read it. I just forwarded him a copy." Cassie watched as Whitby poured steaming water into a forest-green mug. "There was a boy in John's class with Beth--"

Whitby filled a second mug. "Not Paul--?"

"No. He was-- I didn't see them together until later, in the hall outside the lecture. He was-- You know how there's always one who has to play it cool? The one who's too good for it? 'Look at me, I'm not paying attention'--?"

"That would've been me, actually, about twenty years back." Wryly, Whitby blew steam from the surface of her tea, took a cautious sip. "Perpetual brown-nosers such as yourself'd not understand, Cassandra."

"Right." Cassie chuckled, reaching for the second mug. She grew quieter again as she took a swallow of tea. Whitby gave her time. "I saw him with her in the hall. They were walking away. She said something to him, and he turned and looked at me--"

She shuddered.

Whitby asked: "Would you know him if you saw him again?"

"Absolutely."

"You got the same feeling reading that paper as you got when he looked at you, am I right?"

"Detective Wilhelm would _love_ that, wouldn't he?"

"He might give it a listen. Detective Mann'd like as not have you locked up." Whitby frowned, set her mug aside, went to the refrigerator seeking milk. "Any tip's a good tip, Cassie. Call Wilhelm when we're heading out. Need be, we can stop off at the police station before we go back to the hospital."

"Yeah. Thanks."

A moment followed, quiet and thoughtful, as Whitby stirred milk into her tea, and Cassie in turn took the carton and the spoon--

"Loinnir--!" she said, suddenly. "My God-- I nearly forgot--"

Whitby sputtered into her tea. "What--?"

"Congratulations." Cassie smiled openly at her. "You and Mace. I completely forgot--"

"Had a few more pressing things on your mind, didn't you--?" Whitby countered gently, smiling back.

Cassie nodded. Whitby could see in her face the juggling going on in the girl's emotions. Capa hurt, and he was the love of Cassie's life, no lie there. The rat bastard who'd done for him, caught or, more likely, not. And Mace: she wanted what was best for him, sincerely, and for the Scottish virago he'd bound himself to. But they'd been something years back, him and Cassie, and even if that something was nothing more than fuck buddies, you never quite broke a hundred percent away from a fellow who'd treated you well in bed.

Cassie drank more of her tea before she asked: "Did you get a ring out of him?"

"Aye." Whitby smiled, drew up from the collar of her sweater a shining circlet on a silver chain. Two entwined bands in white gold, a single sapphire. She passed the ring and the chain to Cassie. "Says it's him keepin' his eye on me."

"It's beautiful."

Something like guilt chilled the tea in Whitby's belly. "Honest to God, Cass, I didn't mean to ambush him. But Richie was half-reachin' for the shotgun, and Pete was passin' him the shells, and--"

Cassie looked at her blankly. "What--?"

"He-- Mace didn't tell you when he called?"

"No. Tell me wha--"

Then Cassie's eyes went wide. She grinned incredulously. "Loinnir--! Congratulations--!"

Whitby got her mug out of the way just before the hug hit. She found herself grinning, too, with her cheek against Cassie's dark hair. "Thank you, Cass. Thank you--"

Cassie squeezed her. Then she drew away slightly, studied Whitby's face, her own expression sobering. "You are-- I shouldn't assume-- You _are_ happy about it, Loinnir, aren't you? You and Mace--?"

Too many emotions. Too many in twenty-four hours, all of them extreme and most of them bad, and it was as though they'd blindfolded the girl and were slapping her in turn. Whitby gently touched Cassie's cheek.

"Of course we are, Cass." She tipped her forehead to Cassie's, smiled. "Richie, though-- He says it'll be born with feathers and gills."

Cassie chuckled. "As long as it's healthy. Have you found out what it's going to be?"

"Mace and I thought we'd follow your example in that department." Whitby smoothed Cassie's hair, kissed her forehead, released her. She retrieved her mug from the countertop. "Not knowing will drive Richie _insane_."

"You're an evil woman."

"That's the rumor. I tend t' believe it."

Her phone-clip buzzed. Whitby tapped the circuit tab at her collar. "Whitby."

_Loinnir? Mace. You might wanna tell Cass_-- She heard him pause; just as quickly, she felt him realize how frightening said pause could be to her and to anyone else listening on her end.

_He, umm, said something,_ said Mace, after possibly five eternal seconds. _Capa. He was awake_.

* * *

He'd been good about it. Responsible, a loyal crewmate. After Whitby and Cassie had left the police station, Mace had gotten a ride to the nearest Drive Exchange depot and rented himself a car. Americans-- and Mace still counted himself as one of those, notwithstanding the fact that billet, job, fiancee, and new family found him residing for the most part in a country the size of Iowa six thousand miles away-- were still nearly as resistant to the idea of public transportation as their big, variegated nation was. So the government had finally stopped trying to get everyone onto overpriced light rail and into buses and had started the Drive Exchange program instead. Day-rental of vehicles too stripped down and too damned ugly to attract the interest of carjackers and chop shops. The three models the program utilized were in fact exclusive to it, and the manufacturers had gone out of their way to out-do themselves in terms of homeliness and functionality. Mace, having been dropped at the depot, stood under the metal awning that sheltered the auto-select machines from the incessant snow and picked for himself a Cooper Minus. He entered his ident and credit information, and while he waited for the parking shelves to cycle his car from as far as four stories below the pavement, he called to check in with Trey.

_Hey, man_, said Trey. He didn't bother to put himself on the vid circuit. _What's happening? I saw the news. That kid who turned himself in--_

"We talked to him, Trey. Me and Loinnir. Cass was there, too."

_Holy shit. Where are you now?_

"Calling from a car rental. On my way back to the hospital. Listen, Trey-- man, it's just a feeling, but that kid-- I got this feeling he's not--"

-- _not the one who did it. Right? I got that, too, looking at him. I know you've gotta be careful around the quiet ones. Guys like Capa, right--?_ -- and Mace could hear the affection in Trey's voice-- _I know they can be dangerous as shit, but even just seeing this kid on the news--_

Mace's car rumbled into view on the parking lift, flanked by four identical siblings. The retaining bars at the front of its stall slid away. It looked like a short-shank flat-black combat boot with wheels. Heavy bumpers, tires designed for the God-awful weather, along with, Mace knew, a traction and handling system tuned for the car's rental locale.

"He wouldn't have the balls for killing someone. Even someone as irritating as Brainiac. Got that feeling too, Trey."

Trey chuckled thoughtfully. No disrespect to Capa was forthcoming via Mace's comment, he had to know, or no more disrespect than Mace would have shown a younger brother who by military standards sometimes came up short in terms of common sense. Mace was keying in the unlock code on the Minus's door when Trey spoke again:

_They'll sort it out. If he's lying, they'll know. In the meantime-- Mace, I'm assuming you'll see Cassie before I do. You want to let her know: I sorted things out with Minnesota. Capa's contacts at the U send their best wishes, and they say he's free to reschedule those lectures for any time he wants._

"Thanks, Trey." Mace smiled as he climbed into the Minus. "Wait-- You mean to say they didn't just ask you to speak in his place?"

_I can tell 'em how to hack the universe, Mace. I have no fucking clue how the thing's put together._

* * *

When he arrived at Marquette General, things were quieter than they'd been the night before. Fewer people were milled outside the doors, their presence muffled and blunted by the snow, and the news vultures had been driven from the lobby. Mace proceeded back to the intensive care observation area where they'd left Capa the night before. The nurse called Anne wasn't at the center island; in her chair sat a dark-haired fortyish woman with a sensible, no-nonsense build beneath her floral nurse's smock and a name tag that read "Nancy Staerker, R.N." She was writing with a stylus on a data pad.

"Morning," Mace said. "I'm a friend of Robert Capa's. Is he still here--?"

"He certainly is. His father is with him now." With the tip of the stylus, she pointed back toward the alcove where they'd left Capa earlier that morning. Mace automatically tracked the direction of the point. When he did-- he saw, from the corner of his fake eye (the thing had peripherals that just didn't quit)-- she looked him over. Smiled slightly. Appreciatively.

_Uh huh_. Mace smiled, too. He looked back at her. "Thank you," he said politely.

"Mm hm." Her eyes were a deep blue-gray. Sparkles in them. She kept an eyebrow just short of cocked his way as Mace left the island.

He heard John's voice as he approached the alcove. Reading something, not talking. Mace knocked softly on the wall as he looked in.

"John--?"

John Capa rose from a chair next to Capa's bed. He looked tired but not exhausted; his fair hair was less than precisely combed; he'd traded his dress clothes of last night for a comfortably worn brown sweater and blue jeans. Behind him, on the bed, Capa was by all appearances asleep. His face was turned slightly their way on the pillow. He looked impossibly young, despite the stubble that was already darkening his cheeks. Honest to God, Mace thought, the little bastard could grow a beard faster than anyone he'd ever seen. He looked more comfortable, less exposed: someone had arranged a light-weave buff-colored blanket over his torso, and another over his left, unwounded leg. The dressing on his right thigh was clean and white. A monitor on the wall above the bed displayed his stats. Wavy lines, peaked lines, numbers in blue and yellow and green.

"Mace. Hello." John marked his place in the book from which he'd been reading, placed it on a tray-table beside Capa's bed. He gestured to a second chair. "Please: have a seat."

Mace shrugged out of his jacket and sat down. "How is he?"

"Still quiet. His doctor was in earlier. Says his neurological stats look good. No brain damage that they can see." He turned to Capa as he spoke, brushed his fingers gently through his son's hair. "It's up to him now. It's just a question of his wanting to wake up."

"That's good. Better than this morning, anyway." Mace settled back in his chair, looked frankly John's way. "He's gonna be fine, John."

"I know." John sat back down. He looked for a long moment at his son. Then he turned to Mace and said, evenly: "I need to apologize, Stephen."

"For--" His years teaching had given Capa's father a bearing that seemed military, an easy formality that Mace appreciated. He liked John Capa; the quiet distress in the man's face saddened him. "I'm sorry, sir: I don't understand."

"I behaved indecorously this morning."

"When you cried, you mean."

"Yes."

"Shit. John--" Mace stared at him in gentle incredulity. He leaned forward in his chair, parked his elbows on his knees, looked John Capa in the face. "If it'd been my boy, I'd've done the same thing."

John nodded, not meeting Mace's eyes but not avoiding them, either. His own clear eyes were thoughtful.

"You try so hard," he said. "I'm sure your father felt the same way, Stephen: when you and Robert and the others left for the sun. You try so hard to believe _My boy's a hero. My boy died a hero_--

"And all you can think of is the first time he looked at you. The first time he smiled at you. Knew you. The first time he called you 'Da.' All those firsts. And all you can feel now is pain and nothing, because he's dead, and a part of you is dead, too, the very best part of you. And you feel guilty. Guilty. Because you should be proud, so damnably proud, that your son died a hero.

"That's why we couldn't come to Edwards right away when you returned. It wasn't Marjory, Stephen: it was me. A shock to lose someone that precious to you. When we-- when I thought Robert was dead-- Months after the fact, after they'd determined that the solar re-ignition device had worked, after the safety margin they'd allowed for re-establishing contact with the mission. The despair never lessened, but you learned to live with it. Moments you could even forget it. The shock, then-- the shock of having him back: it was nearly as great as losing him."

He paused. Mace waited silently, patiently.

"Dr. Lasky," John continued quietly. "The project head. Father Icarus. He was a cold man, wasn't he--? He made the mistake of asking us, once the _Icarus II_ and her crew were officially declared lost, if there were anything he could do for us, for me and for Marjory. I'm not prone to losing my temper, Mace. I recall feeling calm. But I looked at him and said, 'Should you, from your empyrean heights-- should you, Dr. Lasky, see our son-- would you send him home to us?'" He smiled slightly. "Marge told me later she had a more prosaic suggestion for him. As it was, he never spoke to us again. Not in person."

John settled back in his chair, looked again at his son. He sighed, a soft, lonely sound, like the wind blowing in from the gray reaches of the big lake to the north.

"To sum up: there's no worse feeling in the world, Stephen, than to lose a child. I'm sure Oscar Wilde would find a more clever way of putting it: once being a tragedy, perhaps; twice being beyond comprehension. I lost my son once. I couldn't bear to lose him again."

"I understand, sir."

"May your understanding remain just that, Stephen. May you never learn by experience."

Mace nodded. Both he and John went quiet. The machines monitoring Capa did their work without beeps or whirrings or clicks; Mace couldn't hear him breathing, though he could track the even, measured rise and fall of Capa's chest beneath the blanket. He sat with John for maybe three minutes, thinking, not speaking. Then he said: "Why don't you stretch your legs, John? Check in with Marjory? I can keep an eye on Rip van Winkle here."

"That's a good idea." John stood, moved carefully away from Capa's side. At the entrance to the alcove, he paused. "I know you and Robert have had your differences, Stephen," he said. "But you've been a good friend to him, and a good friend to our family. Marjory and I are glad you're here."

Mace nodded again, respectfully. "Sir."

John returned the nod, a trace of a smile on his tired, troubled face, and left the alcove. Mace watched him go. He remained where he was, in the second visitor's chair, thoughtfully watching the entrance to the alcove. Then he sighed and got up and moved over to the chair nearer the bed.

"Hey, man," he said quietly to Capa. "I'm supposed to talk to you, right? How's it going, Capa...?"

Capa, of course, said nothing. Wasn't even dreaming, by the look of it: his eyes were still beneath his closed lids, and his girlishly long eyelashes were at feathery rest. Mace at first felt silly, speaking to him. His voice felt as though it didn't fit his throat; it sounded too big in the quiet of the alcove. But he kept talking. Told Capa about Paul, the suspect in Capa's stabbing, whom Whitby had kept Mace from thrashing earlier that morning. Told Capa about Whitby herself: how she'd come close to drowning.

And ended up with an engagement ring instead.

"Difference between a push and a shove, Capa. I was gonna ask her. I might not've ever asked her. Just-- umm-- certain things made it-- umm--"

Mace stopped. Sensitivity wasn't his strong suit; confessions-- even to a guy in a coma-- weren't, either. He looked about, away from Capa's closed eyelids, and spotted on the tray table the book John had been reading from earlier. _A Tramp Abroad_.

Mace picked it up, flipped to a random page. Snorted--

"You've gotta be kidding--"

The type was dust-mote-sized; the prose creaked. The thing had to be a hundred years old. He paged back to the front matter--

"Copyright 1880." Mace shut the cover. "Figures."

He felt almost sorry for Capa. Between a dad who taught literature from before the dawn of time and a wife who worshipped on the altar of the great god _Boring_ when it came to reading, the poor guy was trapped. Still, the book had to mean something to him, or it wouldn't be here. Mace dutifully paged back in, cleared his throat--

"But I am not gonna hold your damn hand, Brainiac. Got it--?" He waited through the space of Capa's nonresponse. Looked extra-carefully at the little bastard's face for signs of concealed smirking. Then he started to read.

He began where John had left off, and it was more boring than hell. The narrator-- Twain, he assumed-- and a buddy were taking a train to go hiking somewhere in Germany, and they were talking to a German family on the train, and the family spoke English, and wasn't that a relief, blah blah blah, and just as Mace was wondering who the hell would take a train to go hiking, and his eyes were starting to cross, he stopped reading where he was and began to flip at random.

-- _sabers_. He stopped at the word. Held his place. Skimmed. Smiled slightly. Started to read out loud to Capa--

Students at Heidelberg, these crazy S.O.B.s, they were dueling with heavy sabers. Padded to the gills, sure, but they were knocking the _shit_ out of each other. Twain was standing off with the seconds and the medics, and these guys were sweating and grunting and chopping each other all to bits--

"Shit," Capa said.

Mace stopped reading. He looked at Capa. Capa was looking back at him. Mace's hand was resting over Capa's on the blanket covering Capa's belly.

Mace snatched his hand away. "Fuck you too, Brainiac."

He glowered. Capa smiled slightly.

"Hey, Mace," he murmured--

-- and his eyes closed again.

"Shit--" Mace whispered, as realization struck him. He spoke to Capa's eyelids: "Capa? Shit-- Capa, come on, man--"

He caught himself, observed: Capa was still breathing, and doing so without distress. On the monitor above the bed, his stats still looked good. Mace got up, went to the entrance of the alcove.

"Nurse--?" He gestured to the people at the I.C.U.'s center island. Nurse Staerker stood and came over.

Mace stepped aside for her as she entered the alcove. He could see her professionalism in her: her eyes went to the rise and fall of Capa's chest, to his stats on the monitor. She checked his lines and his tubes and the dressing over his wound; she looked at his face, no doubt noting his skin tone (typically pale but far from blue-- and actually the "typically pale" thing was a lie: living in California, the little shit had been soaking up his fair share of the sun he'd fixed, by the look of him); she laid the back of her hand gently against his cheek.

"Looks good. Feels good." She straightened Capa's blankets as she asked Mace: "Has he been getting up to mischief?"

Much as he would admit to Whitby three minutes later, Mace said: "He, umm, said something."

"'Something.'"

"'Shit.'" Mace felt his cheeks go warm. "He, uh, opened his eyes and said, umm--"

"'Shit.' To you."

"Yes, ma'am. My name, too. He said 'Mace.'"

"I see." She left him hanging for a moment, while Mace felt like a stuttering idiot. The moron, big and too dumb to be a threat, whom John Capa had left to watch over his boy while he went to call his wife and coax a cup of coffee from one of the hospital's dispensers. Mace wilted before the dearth of nonsense in the woman's slate-blue eyes. He'd flown any number of experimental aircraft. He'd been all the way to the sun and back. He'd nearly had half his face blown off in the process. And here he was, fighting an urge to crawl under Capa's bed and hide. Jesus, she'd give Whitby a run for her money in a dead-eyed staring contest. He was bracing for the obvious question--

_-- What the hell did you do to him--?_

-- when Staerker smiled warmly and said: "That's good. He recognized you." She took a final look at Capa's numbers; she reached for his wrist, manually felt his pulse. Then she massaged his fingers gently and laid his hand back on his torso. "That's good, Robert," she said to Capa's calm face. "That's very, very good. You'll be back with us in no time.

"It could still be hours or days," she said to Mace. "Just between you and me. I'm not his neurologist. But he should start to come out of it now. It'll be like that: on and off. He'll be lucid; he'll be disoriented. He'll want to sleep. But he should be back soon." She patted Mace's shoulder as she left the alcove. "I'll let his doctor know. And don't worry: I've heard a lot worse than 'shit' from folks coming out of comas."

"Thanks." Mace returned her smile. He watched her walk back to the center island. Then he reached for his phone.

* * *

When the whole gang showed up, or all of them but Trey and Elena, Capa managed a smile and maybe two minutes of fuzzy consciousness for his wife, for Mace and Whitby, for John and Marjory, finally in from her grueling shift on icy Superior, and it seemed to put his sun-starting trick all to shame.

"Hi, baby," Cassie said, leaning over Capa, caressing his stubbly cheeks. Smiling through tears, she was as radiant as Mace had ever seen her. Mace watched her look at Capa and knew that he was witness to the proper order of things. Moments like these, he knew: he could care for her, he could be her friend, but she wasn't his to love, and she wasn't his to lose. A reminder like antiseptic. It stung, but it was clean and bracing, and it was good for him. His own proper order of things was standing by his side.

"C'mon, you." Whitby took Mace's hand and led him out of the alcove. Mace came along willingly, not only so that Capa could have his first real moment of consciousness alone with his wife and family but so that Nurse Staerker, keeping watch from the center island, wouldn't toss the whole lot of them out on their ears for crowding the little shit.

* * *

Later, though, Mace was restless. Marjory and John had invited him and Whitby to stay at the house, and they could hardly refuse (even if, in what had to qualify at the "cosmic" level in terms of ironies, it meant them sleeping in Capa's old room). But Marge was worn out, between the emotions that had been pounding her for the last twenty-four hours and the shift she'd pulled-- Mace would never be the one to tell her, as he could see in her face that she knew: she was approaching an age when she'd be too old, or at least too sensible, to be hauling idiots out of half-frozen lakes-- and so he and Whitby stopped at a grocery on the way back to the house and took over the night's kitchen duties.

Watching him chop vegetables, Cassie smiled. "You know how to cook now?"

"I'm living in Scotland, remember?" Mace replied. He glanced wryly toward Whitby, who was busy at the stove and the soup-pot. "I had no choice."

"It was either him learning to cook, or sheep-stomach surprise three times a day." Whitby cocked an eyebrow at him. She left the stock to simmer and came to kiss his cheek in the drollest of mock sympathy. "Oh, Mace, you poor thing."

Mace felt himself blush. Cassie snickered. "Whipped."

"Excuse me--" Mace turned on her. "What did you say--?"

Cassie met his eyes. She managed to hide maybe a quarter of her smirk. "'Whipped'--" she said, clearly.

"-- boy," Whitby finished. "_Very_ handy in the kitchen, he is."

"You--" Mace pointed a celery stalk at Cassie. "Shut up. And you--" -- this, now, to Whitby, along with the realization that the grin on his face was no doubt neutralizing the glare he was attempting-- "-- you are swimming all the way back to Mulvern."

* * *

They ate soup and sandwiches, and all of them basked in a low, warm glow of relief. He'd slipped off to sleep again after his two lucid minutes, but Capa had known them. There'd been a moment's confusion when he asked Cassie why she, and not Whitby, was piloting the pod, but he recognized her and knew what she was to him, and he smiled when he saw Marge and John. Dr. Smith met with them before they left the hospital, and the prognosis was good: Capa was neurologically sound (that being, as always, thought Mace, a matter of opinion), the nanoweave they'd used to repair his artery was holding and strong, and he'd avoided crippling damage to the tendons and nerves in his leg. He wouldn't be running a marathon any time soon, but he'd be on his feet-- cautiously, if all continued to go well-- in less than ten days.

So that was the feeling they rode all through dinner: permutations of relief, shared and singular. Mace was glad for his friend's survival (even _that_, though, was a profound admission, and one he'd as soon keep to himself, at least for now. Tough it was for him to admit how much he cared for the little guy.); he was gladder still to see Marge and John smiling and eating, to hear Cassie laugh, to see the contentment in Whitby's watchful eyes. After John and Marge excused themselves, honestly citing exhaustion, for an early night, though, Whitby and Cassie showed Mace what they'd returned to the house for earlier.

A paper. Written by a girl in one of John's classes.

He could feel silence descend on the house like the ceaselessly falling snow. He wasn't one for literary criticism, or even, in fact, much of one for literature at all, but this thing chilled Mace through. Set an anger, a restlessness, stirring in his bones.

Especially when he saw the looks on Cassie's and Whitby's faces. "You think whoever wrote this had something to do with Capa getting stabbed?" he asked.

"We do," Whitby replied frankly.

"Contact information is right here." Mace paged out to the file's ident tag. "Elizabeth Markham, two-ten Spooner Hall, Northern Michigan U." He looked from Cassie to Whitby. "We should check it out."

"Detective Wilhelm will follow up on it, Mace," Cassie said.

Mace looked at her. He knew she wasn't being afraid, only cautious. Always the sensible one. "He hasn't called, Cass."

"No, he hasn't," Whitby concurred. No word, not only about Beth Markham and her paper but also regarding what Wilhelm might have gotten out of Paul Brehmer, too. No word on Cassie's missing phone, either. Whitby took out the keys Mace had given her earlier.

"Let's go," she said.

* * *

It was nine-thirty by the time they stood outside the door of two-ten Spooner Hall. They'd come up unchallenged: the hall was mostly apartments and was reserved for upperclassmen, so there were no floor monitors. The security of the place was entrusted to the dark unblinking eyes of the cameras mounted on the walls. Mace, waiting with Whitby and Cassie in the hall outside Beth Markham's door, found himself wondering how many of those cameras actually worked. And, if they worked, what they had seen in the last twenty-four hours.

Movement from inside. There was a peep-lens on the door; Mace had a sudden sense of being watched.

"Yes? Who is it?" A girl's voice, muffled through the door. Suspicious or irritated or both.

Cassie stepped closer to the door, looked directly into the peep-lens. "Beth? It's Cassandra Capa. We met in Professor Capa's class. May I have a word with you?"

"Regarding what--?"

Mace shifted impatiently on his bootsoles. Cassie said evenly: "I have a question regarding the paper you wanted my husband to read."

A pause. Mace found himself tensing, thinking, imagining: Gunshots from within, bullets splintering the door. The sounds of panic and escape, footsteps thudding away from inside. The jolt as his shoulder connected with the heavy wood panel--

The door opened.

Beth Markham looked like Whitby, and nothing like her at all. She had Loinnir's coloring and her sea-blue eyes, and she was tall. But she was one of those girls who mistook being thin for being beautiful, let alone healthy. Whitby was long and lean, but she had a woman's share of meat on her frame, and she was strong. Mace loved that about her. This kid was brittle. No tone to her, just skin and bone.

"Alright." Her cold blue eyes settled on Mace. "You're Stephen Mace, aren't you...?"

Mace, sensing Whitby bristle, nearly had to suppress a smirk. He settled for a smile of tastefully toothy wattage. "Yes, I am."

"And Lorna Whitby." Beth managed to look at Whitby without taking her eyes off of Mace. _Neat trick, that_, Mace thought. He saw Whitby's right hand knot surreptitiously into a fist. _Gonna be a whole lot harder to pull off when you're unconscious, kid._

"May we come in?" Whitby said.

"Certainly." Beth hesitated for a moment, her eyes going to the hall behind them. Then she ushered them in. Fairly typical student digs, typical mess of papers, books, secondhand furniture. Posters on the wall, art prints and rock groups. Mace stepped onto a worn rag rug in sepia, brown, blue, and red covering a wide patch of the wood floor. "Would you care to sit down--?"

"Thanks, no." Mace made room for Cassie and Whitby. As he did, he stepped to the side; in stepping, he looked off through the apartment's tiny kitchen and into a bedroom. There, on the bed, he saw an open suitcase. "Going somewhere?" he asked Beth.

The charm of his smile was wearing off. Beth stepped past him, through the kitchen, and shut the bedroom door.

"What was it you wanted to ask me?" she asked Cassie.

"That paper," Cassie replied. "Did you write it?"

Beth hesitated. She met Cassie's eyes coldly-- arrogantly, even, Mace thought-- but he could sense a birdlike shaking in her thin bones. "What do you mean?"

Whitby snorted softly. "It's a simple enough question, girl. Did you write it or didn't you?"

"I don't have to--"

"Beth--?" A young man's voice, calling from just outside, in the hall. "God, I thought they'd never leave--"

He walked in and stopped. Stopped both speaking and moving. He looked at Beth, and then at Mace and Whitby and, finally, at Cassie, with eyes so chilly blue that they made Beth's eyes seem like amber honey by comparison. He was tall and scarecrow-thin under his jeans and gray sweatshirt, and he had reddish-fair hair and a mouth like Capa's, those lips that girls seemed to like, a little too lush and full for a guy's lips to be. Only this kid's mouth was cruel-looking. Something like a perpetual smirk to the way it was set. Mace felt an immediate urge to punch it.

"Visitors, Beth? This late?"

"They wanted to know about the paper I wrote," Beth said. "_Fallen Sun_."

"I see." He turned to Whitby. "How do you do? I'm Mike. You're Loinnir Whitby, aren't you?"

Whitby shook the hand he offered her. "I am."

"And Stephen Mace. A pleasure, sir."

Mace's punching urge ratcheted up. He shook the kid's hand instead. Bold grip on the skinny bastard, he had to admit. "Sure. Right," he said.

Then Mike turned to Cassie. "Mrs. Capa, I presume?"

Cassie went absolutely pale. Or maybe it was the lighting. Maybe she was tired. She seemed steady enough as she returned Mike's handshake.

"What's this about Beth's paper?" Mike asked affably, heading for the kitchen. Mace heard a rattle of cutlery. "Can I offer you something to drink--?"

"No, thanks--" Whitby called to him.

Mace started slightly as Cassie touched his hand. He'd been right. She was close to him now, and he could see: she was absolutely white. Her face was very calm, but she was shaking. When she spoke, her voice was such a ghost of itself that Mace had to duck his head to hers to catch the words--

"It's him," she said.


	8. Chapter 8

He had before him a man and three women. The man and two of those women had military training. One of those women was fairly obviously pregnant. The third woman was a sometimes friend, possibly an occasional lover. She regarded him with a modicum of trust. And she was only as dangerous as her temperament would let her be. Only as dangerous as a civilian.

Mike, emerging from the kitchen, stepped in beside Beth. He'd opened for himself a bottle of beer. He took a sip and looked at Mace, and as he asked the older man, politely--

-- "What did you want to know about Beth's paper--?" --

-- he rammed into Beth's lower back the blade of the knife he was carrying in his other hand. She arched with a silent gasp-- really, it was almost funny: like those ancient cartoons by Charles Schulz, _Peanuts_, when Snoopy the beagle went up the sunny beach poking folks in their bare backs with the tip of his cold, cold nose-- and Mike pulled the blade out of her and shoved her into Mace's arms and went out the apartment door. The bottle shattered on the floor of the hall outside.

It took them a second to react. More than a second to realize what had just happened.

"_Fuck_--" Mace breathed.

Whitby met his eyes. Then she was out the door at a run, after the footsteps pounding off down the hall. She heard him shout--

"Loinnir, no-- Wait--!"

But she was already gone. Mike shouldered through the fire door at the end of the hall and thudded down the steps, thundering bootsteps echoing in countertime to his as Whitby went down the steps, too, and then Mike was out the door at the bottom, and she was after him, maybe forty feet behind. The air hit her face like a cold wet rag. She paused at the door only long enough to be sure he wasn't just to the right or left of the frame, waiting for her with that bloody knife. But, no: there he was, dead ahead, running--

She tapped the phone-circuit at her collar.

"Mace, we're heading north," she said, as she sprinted away from the door.

_Copy that, Whitby._

She left the circuit open. She kept her eyes on Mike. She ran after him, and her boots made no sound on the snow.

* * *

Cassie helped Mace lower Beth to the rag-strip rug. She was breathing shallowly and rapidly: panic, pain. A bloodstain spreading darkly in the region of her right kidney. Her eyes were glazing with shock--

"I'll call an ambulance," Cassie said. She looked at Mace. "Go."

"Call the cops, too." Mace straightened. He reached down, squeezed her shoulder, met her eyes. Then he turned and went out the door.

* * *

She liked to say that she was a diver before she was a pilot or an astronaut, and that the latter two were easier jobs by far than the first, and a situation like this was where the proof lay: it was dark, beyond the lights of the campus, and that's where they were now, she and Mike, heading north by northwest, and the air was swirling with snow as thick as the silt an amateur like Teddy McElhone would stir up on the ocean's bottom, and still she could see Mike, sense him, _track_ him. Kept herself calm, her mind, her eyes, her breathing, too: the ground was uneven and the snow was deep, nothing but treacherous wet slop underfoot, and the going was slow, as heavy as moving under pressure, but she kept moving forward, methodically. They crossed a street, a white tire-tracked river, no cars in sight, and pushed their private ways through bare twig-snaps of bushes into a region of trees. Pine and birch. Mike didn't slow, didn't look behind him. Whitby could see he knew how to move in snow: from the region, no doubt. A local boy. She scowled at his sweatshirted, retreating back--

_Now where would you be takin' me on our first date?_

* * *

Mace was maybe three minutes behind. He had their trail and was moving north, though the wind and snow were already blunting the footprints before him. He looked ahead, focusing hard with his prosthetic eye, and got nothing but a sudden stab of pain in his left temple as the processors, trying to track every damn snowflake, momentarily overloaded his optic nerve with data--

"Shit--!" He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, shook the pain from his head. "Whitby, talk to me."

_Mace_--

She was panting, but not panicking--

_-- we're comin' up on another road. He's twenty, thirty meters ahead, and-- Fuck--!_

A grunt, then nothing.

Mace opened his eyes. "Loinnir?"

A two-count while he told himself to stay calm. He was seasoned enough not to have to remind himself that panicking would only rob him of air and concentration. It would render him vulnerable, it wouldn't help Whitby, and it wouldn't stop the little prick they were hunting down. Mace set off again, at a run, in Whitby's eroding bootprints.

* * *

Sometimes Cassie hated her soft heart.

No use worrying after Mace and Whitby, off like wolves after Mike; God or-- more fittingly-- the devil help the boy when they caught him, whether he had a boning knife in his hand or not. When she went for the phone, Cassie saw by its absence the blade, slender and savage, that was missing from the knife-block. Mike hadn't rummaged his weapon from the cutlery drawer at all. He'd uncapped his beer with the bottle opener, drawn the knife, and stabbed Beth. Who, now, bleeding forth from her right kidney onto the common-room rug, was the focal point of the compassion Cassie wanted not to feel.

"The ambulance is coming," she told Beth as she came back to the common room and knelt beside her. Cassie had the girl on her side on the floor. She found in the linen closet a blanket and a short stack of hand towels, one of which she pressed, folded, to the seeping hole in Beth's back. Beth arched in pain. Her right hand clawed birdlike and blindly at the air, and when her fingers caught Cassie's free hand and clung to it, Cassie couldn't bring herself to pull away.

To the air before her pale face, Beth whispered: "Am I going to die?"

"I don't know, Beth," Cassie replied, honestly.

"It was Mike who stabbed Rob-- your husband. Paul was with me."

Cassie's jaw tightened. She'd called Detective Wilhelm after she called for the medics, and he'd not only expressed his surprise at where she was-- Detective Mann had finished the department's preliminary questioning of Mike less than an hour before, in an apartment one floor above Beth's-- but he'd told her, too: he'd been trying to reach her. Someone had turned in her phone. Water had seeped into it from lying in the snow, but the department's tech team had salvaged and dried out the memory card. They had no visuals of Capa's attacker, but they had a voice print.

Half an hour ago, Detective Wilhelm had discovered that that voice didn't match Paul's.

_Dr. Capa, I presume--?_

Now he didn't have to wait until the morning, when Mike would have been brought to the station for more thorough questioning, to know that Paul's roommate, not Paul, had attacked Robert Capa. If Mike had been available, that is. In her search for the blanket and towels, Cassie had opened the door to Beth's bedroom. She'd seen the carryon, the suitcase on the bed half-packed. She thought of Mike coming into Beth's apartment, the casual relief in his voice-- the voice Wilhelm's people had conjured from her phone's memory chip, the voice of the man who'd viciously attacked her husband-- and she shuddered with anger and revulsion. He would have been gone by morning, and this stupid, cold girl who was drifting into shock on the floor before her would have gone with him.

And still Cassie felt pity. Empathy for Beth's fear. She glanced at the clock reading on the room's three-dee. "It won't be long now, Beth. The medics will be here any second."

Beth nodded. She shivered under the blanket.

"They were just words," she stammered. "The paper. No one was supposed to-- They were just words." She turned her head, looked up at Cassie. "I'm so sorry."

Cassie looked back at the girl and felt her pity transform itself into something harder, more distant.

"Save it, Beth," she said. "Apologize to my husband when you mean it. Not when you're doing it out of fear."

* * *

The cliche would have been for Whitby to look the wrong way as she tried to cross the highway. A glance to the right, not the left, and then a heartstop moment frozen in a maelstrom of snowflakes before the glare of headlights became a bumper, a bonnet, and a windscreen. A bone-cracking thump, a tossing, a tumbling, and crippling or death for a Scotswoman wayward on a road in North America.

But that wasn't what happened.

As she spoke to Mace, Whitby was making her way into a ditch on the south side of Lake Shore Boulevard. She'd lost sight of Mike, but she had his trail, or what had to be his trail. He must already have reached the road. She was wading in snow nearly to her hips as she descended the ditch's near side, brown tall grass feather-slapping her hands and the outer shell of her jacket. "-- Twenty, thirty meters ahead," she was saying to Mace--

-- when the ground dropped out from under her.

At first she thought she'd fallen through ice. That there was water here, not earth. Her breath went out in a cry of "Fuck--!"

-- and then she found herself on her rump on a tufted crush of grass. She caught her breath. She was buried, but she wasn't suffocating. She cautiously stood.

It was that bloody deep. The ditch, the snow. She snorted at herself. She ought to have remembered: American highway features-- signs, lanes, off-ramps, culverts-- were a dozen times bigger than they appeared from the road. Land of the bloody giants. Up to her chest she was.

_Loinnir--?_

She brushed snow from her collar, tipped her head toward her phone clip. "I'm okay, Stephen. I fell, that's all. Mind the snow in the ditches."

_Got it._

Two words, and she could hear the relief in his voice. She waded the ditch, more like swam it, really, twisting her hips and torso in long, rolling strides. Snow sifted in under her jacket collar, melted in wet shudders down her back. When she made her way up onto the shoulder of the lake highway, Mike was out of sight.

Not seeing him, Whitby looked first for signs of stopping. He might have tried, right off, to catch a ride. But there were no brakelights to the right or left, no dark low bulk of a car idling on the shoulder. Headlights approached from the left: a truck flashed by in a rush of air, whipping up snow in its wake. Whitby crossed the crown of the highway's westbound lanes, waded the center ditch. She paused at the inner shoulder of the eastbound lanes as two cars whisked by, fifty meters between them, snowflakes spinning in their headlights. She looked: no sign of Mike ahead of her, no sign of Mace behind.

She crossed the highway and found Mike's trail. The footprints slurred their snowy way down a drop far shallower than the ditch on the road's south side; they led, through scrubby tall grass and rocks, to a piling of boulders maybe six meters high. No way around. Whitby started to make her way up and over.

She was maybe two meters from the top when she realized that what she was climbing wasn't stone.

It was snow-covered ice. What Superior, shrugging free of winter, had tossed up on her own rocky shore.

Whitby's boots had good, soft soles suited to traction on surfaces wet or slick, but here she found herself among sharp ridges ready to tear flesh, to snag and snap bones. For the first time since she and Mike had started their chase, she felt anger. He'd led her up into a trap; she'd followed him. No comfort in the fact that he was risking his life along with hers: she hadn't heard him shout in pain, and she certainly couldn't see him, lying with his neck broken or his leg twisted wrong in a crevice.

_You bony fucker._

Her anger took her to the top of the ice-mound and over it. The focus of pursuit kept her moving, then, when she saw his footprints leading off ahead of her on the ground beyond. She assumed she was crossing a stretch of beach. The wind was blowing from the north; the surface ahead was flat, the air above grayish-black and swirling with snow.

She was maybe twenty meters away from the piled ice when she realized two things: She wasn't on a beach. She was on the lake.

And for once she didn't need Richie to tell her: she was being stupid.

She went still. She stood for a long moment looking at the footprints leading off into the distance. The snow was stopping but not settling, still caught in the skirling north wind. A half moon was beginning to cut its pale way through the clouds, and she could see the lights of Marquette, distantly, a crescent galaxy of stars, along the shore to her right.

Whitby breathed the snowy air, calmed herself, reasoned. She knew sea ice, not lake ice. Not freshwater ice. Mike was nowhere to be seen.

And she was thinking for two now.

Her free hand went gently, protectively, to her abdomen as she spoke to her phone clip. "Mace," she said, "I've lost him. He's on the lake. We're maybe three kilometers west of Marquette. I'm coming back in."

_Copy that, Loinnir. I'm at the highway. I'll wait for you._

Whitby took a last look at the invisible horizon. Mike was well and truly gone. Let Wilhelm and his boys hunt him down. Let him fall through the ice and drown himself in this rocky inland sea. She turned for the ice-piled shore. She moved more cautiously, now that sense had displaced her anger. She kept to the tracks she'd already made.

She stepped maybe four inches outside her fifth bootprint, and her right foot went through the ice.

Her left knee twisted painfully beneath her when she fell; she compounded said pain when, instinctively, she threw her torso to the left, away from the iciness swallowing her right leg. She landed on her back. A moment of helpless, primal terror as she waited for the ice beneath her to give way--

But it didn't. It held. She reached cautiously to her right, down through the snow. Her hand met icy slush. She eased her weight to the left, and it was as though she could feel the ice sink beneath her, the whole shelf, from where she lay all the way to the shore. Water slurped up through the hole around her right leg. She was soaked to the hip, and as she moved she could feel the ice tip slightly beneath her, sliding her to the right--

She lay back. Breathed. Tried not to think about the cold wetness drawing her down. Tried not to imagine the depth of the dark water beneath the ice.

"Mace," she said to her phone clip, quietly-- as if the lake could hear-- "I've stepped through the ice."

_Christ-- Loinnir, did you fall in?_

"About a third of me did." She nearly smiled. The grimness, the wet and cold of it. Above her, beyond the whirling snow, stars were prickling the blue-black sky. "I'm not sure if I can pull myself free."

_I'll be right there--_

"Call for help, darling. Can't have both of us out here like--"

Movement. Behind her head, to her left. She twisted her neck to see--

Mike.

He'd followed his tracks back, and now he was standing about five meters away, watching her. He held the knife in his right hand. He'd cleaned Beth's blood from the blade, and the metal was a flat dull gray in the snowy darkness.

He came a meter closer. Paused.

"Mace, he's here," Whitby said. She didn't keep her voice down this time. Mike started at the sound, slightly. For a moment, she thought he might turn and go.

But he didn't. He stood there, studying the ice around them--

_I'll be right there, Loinnir._

Nothing useless passed between them. She didn't say "Hurry--!"; he didn't say "Hold on." She kept the circuit open. If she was to be murdered here, there'd be a record of it.

Really, though, the situation was almost ludicrous: she was afraid to get up; Mike was afraid to come close enough to stab her. And he _did_ want to stab her; of that she was certain. She saw killing in the ease of his posture, heard it in his silence. Obviously, he knew more about the winter lake and the bay than she did. He had only to pick his path to her.

He moved. He broke from stillness into a light, quick, silent stride. He angled to the left of his path outbound and crossed the distance between himself and Whitby. He stepped into her blind spot as he approached, an area just beyond the crown of her head: she had a choice of seeing or defending, and in the split second before the blade came at her face, she threw up her right arm. The blade slit the forearm of her jacket, sliced through her sweater and the skin beneath. She hissed with pain; she grabbed for his wrist with her left hand--

Mike stepped away. He had to know she had little chance of pulling her leg free, let alone of pulling it free while defending herself. She was like a bloody tortoise belly-up on the ice.

Still, she said, while he picked his next angle of attack: "Walk away, lad. All you have t'do is walk the fuck away."

His lips pulled back in the slightest of smirks. His eyes stayed thoughtful and still. He stepped in and cut her again, this time across the back of her left wrist. Then, when she moved to block with her right arm, he slashed her forearm again, more deeply than before. The blade glanced off the bone, and Whitby shrieked with pain--

Mike stabbed her in the chest. Only, just before he brought the blade down, he paused for a second-- just a second, mind-- to tighten his smirk into something more ghoulish. And, as he did, Whitby from behind a red scrim of pain launched her left fist at his jaw. It was an awkward angle, a rotten punch. But it connected. Mike's lower teeth clacked sharply into his uppers. He took a surprised, stumbling step backward, the stab aborted--

"Walk. The fuck. Away," Whitby panted at him.

He dropped back onto his haunches, out of her arm's reach. He crab-walked two steps away and stopped. She waited for him to straighten; she thought he might have listened to her.

But he stayed where he was. He was watching her again, but he wasn't looking at her face. He was studying her torso. Her legs. The one, anyway, the left one, twisted under her on the snow.

A clear shot at the inner thigh.

Where he'd stabbed Capa. Old tricks being the best tricks. The quickest tricks. Like now, when the blade shot forward, and she'd been lying too long on the ice, her other leg too long submerged in water razor-cut cold, and she was in pain and bleeding, and she wasn't fast enough to--

Mace tackled him. A full-body hit, heavy and fast and murderous. Together they flew a full three meters through the air. They landed in paired grunts and an uprush of snow on the ice; miraculously, they didn't fall through. Mike didn't drop the knife. He slashed at Mace as he rolled to his feet; he cut Mace across the chest, right through his jacket--

Which, of course, only made Mace madder. He was fast for his size anyway; he was even faster now. Before Mike could cut him again, Mace stepped in and punched him. His fist hit Mike's jaw hard enough to send the boy reeling backward, northward. Farther out onto the lake.

_Onto thinner ice._

In the moment when Mace moved to follow Mike, Whitby came as close as she'd ever come to screaming. "Stephen, _no_--!"

Five meters away from her, hesitating in mid-stride, Mace broke through the ice.

Then Mike broke through, too.

* * *

A ripple effect. Or a crackling one. Whatever faults there'd been in the ice around them began to awaken en masse. A chorus of gurglings and pops, deep cold gratings. Suddenly the ice around Mike was a field of slabs, chunks two meters across or less, and Mace was in a hole at the very edge of that field, where the ice was still a white sheet. Both he and Mike had gone under when they'd fallen in, and they were soaked to the tops of their heads; they were pawing in shock at the ice around them. Whitby could see both of them trying to remain calm, Mace as a professional soldier, Mike as a lifelong denizen of this icy hell, who'd no doubt had his share of drills in the ways of cold-water survival. But he couldn't get a grip on the chunks of ice around him: Whitby saw him pull at one, saw it turn turtle before him and present its clear green belly to the cold night sky. Mace's efforts were equally futile. The ice was breaking away as he tried to drag himself free. He would have three, maybe four, useful minutes. Then the cold would have sapped too much of his body heat, and he would be too weak to pull himself clear.

_Time to move._

Whitby lay back, breathed out. Dropped into a dark place deep inside herself, a calm not of space or of vacuum but of black cold silt-free water. She drew a breath as she would from her main tank on a dive, slowly and deeply, and tightened the muscles all along her body's left side. She rolled her weight slowly, then, onto her left arm and the protesting ligaments of her left quadriceps and knee and drew her right leg free of Superior's slushy grip.

She lay on her belly. The ice below her held. She eased up onto her knees and unzipped her jacket and took it off. She laid herself flat again. And she inched her way toward Mace, taking her jacket with her.

He saw her coming; he warned her back with his eyes. Neither of them bothered to speak. A waste of air, of effort. Whitby held tight to the cuff of one sleeve of her jacket and tossed the other cuff toward Mace. A rope of sorts. He grabbed, caught, held on. Silence, still, and gasping, then, too, as they both started to pull. His shoulders cleared the water, his sternum crested the hole's brittle edge--

And the sleeve in Whitby's hand-- the right sleeve of her jacket-- began to rip where Mike had slashed it.

All she could hear was the tearing. That, and the ragged pounding of her heart in her ears. She saw the jacket's fiberfill blossom forth as the gash in the cloth widened. She saw Mace looking at her from six hopeless feet away--

She pulled with everything she had, with every bit of strength in her cold torso, her slashed arms. Mace pulled too, snarling with effort. He heaved his belly onto the ice as the sleeve tore through; Whitby launched herself forward and caught the jacket by the shoulder and pulled again, blindly, desperately--

And she and Mace dragged Mace clear. He was out of the water. He lay panting on the ice, his breath shuddering from his throat, steaming in the cold air. Then he hauled himself onto his elbows and inched his way back toward Whitby. She caught him when he neared, by the soaked shoulders of his jacket, his upper arms, and they pulled themselves up, sitting, near the path Mace had made on his way onto the lake. He said nothing; neither did she. He kept his eyes on her, though, as she unzipped and drew off his jacket. He was dripping wet. Her jacket, damaged though it was, was dry. She wrapped it around Mace's shaking shoulders and hugged him close.

* * *

Mike was pawing, still, at the ice surrounding him. His movements, though, had in the last three minutes become less conscious, more automatic. Weaker. Whitby held Mace, and they both sat looking at him. He looked back. And she thought he must know: even if she and Mace cared enough to try to help him, they hadn't the strength.

"You brought it on yourself, lad," she said.

Mike got his arms one final time around a chunk of ice. It upended in the water and pushed him under.

* * *

He never came up.

* * *

At least not in the thirty seconds they sat and watched. Or in the two extra minutes it took for them to get underway. And that should have been enough time for the greatest of lakes to swallow the bastard whole, him and his black soul, too. Whitby staggered to her feet. Her right leg was stiff with cold; the trouser leg itself was icing up. Her left knee felt like the landing point of a caber toss. Mace stumbled to his feet beside her. Before they started their trek to shore, she got him zipped properly into her jacket. She wore it a size or so too large; it fit him well enough.

"Let's get somewhere warm," she said.

She put her hand to his cheek; Mace turned his head, pressed his cold lips to her palm.

"B--best suggestion I've huh-heard all day," he stuttered. He smiled for her, shivering, and Whitby smiled back. "C'mon, Pilot."

"Right beside you, tool."

He put his arm around her shoulders, Whitby held him around the waist, and, together, they staggered toward solid ground.

* * *

Beth didn't die. She lost a kidney. She lost her scholarships and any chance she might have had for a degree. And she lost Paul.

* * *

Who didn't kill himself in his cell. He was released. He left Northern Michigan U and returned to Milwaukee.

Capa would decline to press charges.

"That's stupid, man," Mace said.

"He was protecting his friends," Capa countered.

"He's an asshole."

"He wasn't the one who stabbed me, Mace." He looked at Mace with patient weariness in his unearthly eyes, and Mace knew: he wanted it to be over. Cassie wanted it, too.

So Mace let it drop.

* * *

What he found harder to drop, oddly enough, was Mike. Superior never gave him up. Mace thought of what John had said about not even having his son's body to bury when he believed Capa lost; he thought of Mike's parents, whoever they might be, grieving however much people who could produce a kid like that could grieve. Then he let that drop as well.

"You brought it on yourself, kid," he murmured. Loinnir's belief. His, too.

* * *

They'd stepped off Superior into a chorus of lights. Red, blue, and yellow flashing from police cars and emergency vehicles. Spotlights spiking across the lake's icy surface. Wilhelm was there, looking relieved and just a bit angry, too-- at himself, Mace guessed, and not just at him and Whitby, for whatever skullduggery they'd been pulling out on the ice. The EMT who helped Whitby and Mace get themselves aboard an ambulance was a big, sandy-haired guy named Jerry.

"They say you got the kid who stabbed Marge's boy," he said, quietly, as he sat in the back with them on the way to Marquette General. "That true?"

"Y'ask her," Whitby said, nodding her shaking head toward the dark lake to her left, beyond the bulkhead of the SuperTrac in which she and Mace and Jerry rode. "She has him now."

* * *

They sewed up her arms, treated her strained knee, gave her a half-dozen pain meds for later. Mace they kept overnight for observation. A potential for what they called "aftershock": super-chilled blood could cause strokes or respiratory failure when it began to re-circulate in a warming body. When Whitby handed back the meds, saying she was pregnant, the emergency staff at Marquette General suggested that she, too, spend the night. She didn't argue it.

* * *

They were home-- to the big cabin south of Carver Lake-- a day later. Capa came home two days after that. Mace and John hoisted him out of the Behemoth and walked him between them up the wide wooden steps. He was no weight at all, the little guy who'd saved the world. He had one arm over Mace's shoulder and his other arm over his father's, and between the two of them they could lift his booted feet clear of the snow with no effort whatsoever.

* * *

Cassie got him settled in a spare room on the cabin's first floor. Good for Capa: he didn't have to navigate the stairs to the second floor, and there was a bathroom right next door. Good for Cassie, too: John's library was right across the hall. Capa was a decent patient. He wasn't demanding; he was quiet and polite. Mace knew that from living with him aboard the 'pod. The little guy adored Cassie, and she adored him. That much was plain, too. He heard them talking together, laughing softly together, murmuring. He heard long silent spaces, when he could tell, glancing at the half-closed door to that spare room, that Cassie was sitting beside Capa, and she was reading or watching him sleep, or she was holding his hand while they did nothing but look at each other. And that, Mace thought, was just as things should be.

He and Whitby were doing their own fair share of sitting and looking. The house had that sort of effect. He'd had a major shock to his system, and she was hurt, too, on top of being pregnant. It felt good to rest. They hadn't stopped moving, it seemed, since they'd come back from the sun. Press conferences, debriefings, new commissions, travel. Adjustments to becoming something more than human, almost. Heroes, gods among men.

Or the angels who had served the scrawny, scruffy sun-god now unfussily occupying a spare room in a snow-covered cabin in Michigan. In those first days back from the hospital, Whitby and Capa started up chess games that concluded hours later. And not because of the intensity of the thought involved, the passion in the play. Mace saw Cassie at the door of the spare room; her shoulders were shaking.

He came closer, put his hand on her arm; he thought she was crying. "Cass--?"

"Look," she whispered-- just as Mace realized she wasn't crying. She was trying not to laugh.

Whitby, sitting in a stuffed chair beside Capa's bed, was sound asleep. Across the chessboard from her, Capa was asleep, too-- with his hand poised over the board, the tips of his long, heavy-knuckled fingers frozen on a rook.

"And they're _both_ cheating," Cassie whispered. "I think Loinnir's lost the same bishop three times now."

* * *

"Care to do an old woman one last favor, Stephen?"

Mace was helping Marjory carry firewood into the cabin's concrete-floored lower level. They bumped and shouldered their way in through the windowed wooden door, into the area of the house where Mace found himself feeling most at home. Tools clipped neatly to pegboard on the walls, an old red-and-white low-horse outboard and a trolling motor hanging from heavy clamps, the mild asphalt tang of oil and grease. He stacked his pieces of wood in a tidy pile to the right of the door and swatted bark chips from his hands.

"Haven't seen any old women around here, Marge. Beautiful ones, maybe." He smiled at her sincerely. "Anything. Name it."

Marjory smiled back at him, through a most atypical blush. "You and Loinnir can talk your way onto pretty much any flight you want, am I right?"

"Yep."

"Robert and Cassie are too shy to ask--" She looked at him evenly, a little wryly. "Care to take a trip to California?"

* * *

And so Charlie saw the snow.

It would be gone in a week or so, but it was waiting for him when Marge and Mace brought him back-- with Elaine Cassidy's blessing-- from San Diego. The sun was testing the air above the pines and the bare white birch trees when he stormed in and caught Cassie, surprised and delighted, in a four-year-old's stampede of affection.

"Momma--!" His eyes were the color of the sky through the spindly snow-stacked branches. Cassie knelt to meet him in the coming hug, held him close. "I flew in the plane!"

She smiled and teared up-- she smiled even more at _that_, the odd, sweet irony of happiness. "Really, Charlie--? Did Mace and Grandma--" -- with a gently accusing look at the two who were too nonchalantly getting the rest of the way out of their coats and boots just inside the front door, and smiling to themselves, secretively, as they did-- "-- did they let you look out the window--?"

"Uh huh." As Cassie unfastened his jacket, Charlie looked at her with his father's awe in his wide eyes. No need to get alarmed over what he'd tracked in on his boots: the snow was clean. At any rate, any damage to the carpet, she thought, wryly, would be Marge's own darn fault. "There were clouds, Momma. They were _big_. We flew over mountains--!"

* * *

She told him he had to be quiet around Daddy, who was sleeping, and gentle, too, and Charlie with a child's unquestioning ease switched from "dynamo" to "little gentleman." He held his momma's hand as Cassie led him to the spare room, where Capa was napping. He climbed up on the chair beside the bed, carefully hugged his father around the neck, and rested his cheek against Capa's.

"Hi, Daddy," he whispered.

* * *

He showed more decorum than Trey and Elena, who blew in like their own Air-Cav division later that afternoon bearing bags of vegetables and meat and flour and other fine comestibles and who announced to the lady of the house that they were there to assist in the making of dinner, which was to feature Upper Michigan's most noted delicacy.

"You're telling me," said Marge unto Trey, with droll skepticism, "that a Chinese astronaut is gonna show a Yooper how to make pasties...?"

"Marjory, I resent that deeply," replied Trey, as he and she and Elena unpacked the grocery bags, mustered utensils. "Chinese _hacker_, if you please."

* * *

From the bay window at the back of the cabin's first floor, Cassie stood and watched her son romp with Mace in the snow. He swept Charlie clear off the ground, an airplane swing, Charlie laughing and absolutely safe in Mace's strong hands; Cassie smiled as Mace grinned and she saw as much as heard him say--

"Gee, kid, you weigh as much as your old man--!"

Whitby and John emerged, booted and jacketed, from the snowy woods, back from a walk, Whitby wanting to stretch her knee, and at the edge of the back yard they parted company. She waved John off with a gloved hand and a smile, and, as Capa senior came back toward the house, she made her way toward the snowy fray. Mace, seeing her approach, bent and rolled himself a snowball.

"Charlie! Get her!"

As Whitby roughly-- but affectionately-- got got, and did her own snowy share of getting, too, Capa came up quietly behind Cassie and joined her at the window.

"I dreamed he was here," he said, wonder soft in his voice as he looked out. "Charlie."

Cassie didn't tell him that he shouldn't be up, walking on his own. She reached back, caught his hands, drew his arms around her waist. Capa held her; she thus supported him.

"They'll need the practice," she said, smiling, watching Mace and Whitby play with Charlie. She added, as Capa rested his chin on her shoulder: "_He_ was moving, too. Earlier. While you were sleeping."

"Hm--?"

She took his hand, slipped his fingers under her sweater to the spot on the right side of her abdomen where she'd felt it, a fluttering as of mothwings. Capa went still, his breathing soft and steady next to her ear, concentrating--

"_Oh_--"

-- at a sparrow-beat beneath Cassie's skin, beneath his fingertips. Capa squeezed her, and Cassie wrapped her arms around his and relaxed, and together they watched the sweet destruction outside, listened to the battle between the Chinese delegation and the Yoopers-- two Yoopers, now, John having joined the chaos-- in the kitchen.

"_She_, you mean," Capa countered, gently rubbing Cassie's belly.

"Okay." She could sense him, every bit of him. She could sense his muscles, his bones, his blood, the shift and motion in his joints. She could feel his warmth through the jersey shorts and the old t-shirt and the baggy worn robe he wore. She felt the returning strength in the wiry arms with which he held her. She pressed her fingers over Capa's, there in the vicinity of the feather-light fluttering in her belly, and said, with love: "We'll certainly see, won't we--?"

**THE END**


End file.
